Three Cheers For The Paraclete (9 page)

‘It’s not all that much,’ he pursued. ‘It won’t buy much. It might start something, though.’

‘I’d like some land,’ Joe admitted. ‘Sloping land with a bit of sandstone for a rockery. I’d like some trees on it, pines and gums, so you don’t have to see your neighbour’s house first thing each morning, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘Remember how our people had a bit of pride? If they had a door strangers could see into, they grew something in front of it, or put a trellis up. No one’s got any pride round here. And the landlord’s a bloody Grand Master of the Masons or something. Wait there a second.’

Joe made off down the yard to fill his water-tin.

‘Don’t tell Morna till I’ve gone,’ Maitland hissed after him.

‘I’m just going to the tap.’

And Maitland could hear Morna pestering Joe from the back window, the man saying scarcely a word.

When he came back, Joe said, ‘What do you do with a bank cheque?’

‘Just sign it. They’ll show you at the bank.’

‘This isn’t a joke?’

Maitland raised both hands to his ears and shook his head. ‘Whose joke would it be likely to be?’

He could scarcely believe how desperate he was to get away. If charity was an immersion in other people, he did not know how to immerse himself in Morna and Joe; but he knew as well that if he did know he would not do it, and that this was what his antiseptic bank cheque was a measure of.

‘Keep the envelope!’ he said.

Joe grinned. ‘Morna’s seen it. She thinks you’ve talked me into joining some holy society.’

‘Don’t believe in ’em,’ Maitland said.

He watched his cousin re-enter the coop and put down the can ungrudgingly.

He said gratefully, ‘I’d better collect my coat.’

N
OW THAT HIS
work had been parcelled off to the publisher, Maitland began to give up some nights of the week to having three students in his room to talk about their history or, better still, just to talk. He dreaded, as any man must whose image of the profoundest God is a surgical trolley, to intervene in their deeper beliefs and resentments. What he most enjoyed was the palliative work of making them cups of coffee and cutting them cake. Over such suppers he met nine, sometimes twelve, students each week, and promised himself that after twenty weeks he would know every student in the House.

Gaiety brews easily among monks, soldiers and all other cloistered men. Maitland had only to make it clear that they were his guests, to move the radiator closer, to produce the yellow cake-tin with its picture of the King of the Belgians, to set the odd brotherhood of his four cups ready for coffee, and these mechanical and graceless acts assured the success of the evening. Their bridegroom – the books of spirituality spoke of their souls as feminine and the Lord as their bridegroom – had not brought them to a house where all was accustomed, ceremonious; so that some of them would always remember Maitland’s makeshift soirées as pleasant. Which, in itself, was some achievement for a man so unskilled in brotherhood.

After ten such evenings he felt like pleading catarrh and having the night for himself. He was still arguing the point with himself when the three students arrived. One of them was a dark man of his own age with long intelligent lips, and eyes that had ideas of their own. His name was Edmonds, and two minutes after Maitland had said good night to the three of them, turned the radiator off and taken, more than loth, to his prie-dieu, Edmonds came back to the room.

‘I’m sorry, Dr Maitland. Could I have a word?’

In the bad light of the ante-room the student seemed large and coy. Light from the bedroom pointed up his remorseful ham-fists.

‘Of course. Come in.’

Upstairs the supper bell rang. They could hear students clumping out of rooms to the small mercies of cups of tea and biscuits. Shivering, Maitland switched back on the substantial mercy of the radiator.

‘Sit down,’ he said; but in case the priest came to regret the invitation, Edmonds merely took hold of a chair-back with both hands.

‘Were you working?’ he asked.

‘No. I certainly wasn’t working.’

‘Not after your visitors, I suppose. You go to a lot of trouble to make them welcome. I hope it’s worth your while.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Well, it’s very pleasant for all parties – except for you, of course.’

‘Then why isn’t it worth while?’

‘Monsignor Nolan won’t like it. He’s the cattle baron and we’re the beef. To extend the image a bit, he doesn’t like having an outsider cut three of us out of the herd for any purpose he doesn’t understand. Pardon my talking so straight. But he’ll let you go on giving these
evenings until he finds some irregularity he can blame on them, some breach of rules or of the etiquette due to him as number-one pooh-bah. He could use something like that to dismiss you from the service, and if you went, it’d be a tragedy.’

Maitland sat down laughing. ‘Please. I’ve been here three months – under surveillance too. I’ve given seven plodding classes a week and I say Mass on a back altar each morning. I know one out of every six or seven students. I think my loss could be borne.’

‘Do you think I came back just to flatter you?’ Edmonds rumbled.

Maitland leant forward on his elbows and stared at the litter of scholarship on his desk. He smiled, not too wryly, Edmonds being, at least in terms of the House of Studies, a man of the world.

‘I can’t imagine you did.’

‘Why it would be a tragedy is that you don’t pretend to be secure in that old-fashioned way in which Monsignor Nolan is. Or pretends to be.’

‘No pretends about it. He is secure. As I’m not.’

‘You should be grateful. That old-time security breeds old-time arrogance. You have neither.’ Edmonds smiled for the first time. ‘You’re a good example to the boys.’

‘Because I don’t know what I believe? You can’t tell me that, Mr Edmonds. And sit down when I bloody-well tell you.’

Maitland was off-handedly obeyed; Edmonds was keyed for argument.

‘Doctor Maitland, what do you think of Henry James?’

The priest sighed. ‘I don’t know if he was secure and arrogant like Monsignor Nolan or insecure and arrogant like me.’

‘Seriously. Is he a genius?’

‘Everyone says so.’

‘Say you had to examine the nature of his genius. Do you think you could easily sum up its nature in a few more or less scientific sentences? Do you think his genius would partake of quantity or mystery?’

Maitland scratched his head and gave the beset giggle of a man detained too long in a pub. ‘Mystery,’ however, he said. ‘Definitely mystery.’

‘That’s right. Yet there are Freudian fanatics who believe they can define the quality of the man’s genius by explaining that James’s dad had a leg missing and this aroused in young Henry a castration complex of the type that made him court injury of a similar nature to his father’s and that all those marvellous novels are the results of a fruitfully applied neurosis all having to do with the, well, with the knackers. Do you think they’re right or wrong?’

‘They must be more wrong than not.’

‘Exactly. You can’t explain something as big as James in those terms.’

‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

‘Yet the men who do explain him this way are absolutely sure, quite secure in their little bits of Freud?’

‘I suppose so.’

To be honest, Maitland admitted, he was enjoying this grilling.

‘Well,’ said Edmonds, ‘that’s the way Costello’s lecture notes go. I mean, if Henry James is a mystery, what about the God who breathed on Henry James? But Costello isn’t dismayed. You know the way he works. Question: Is God a leprechaun? No, God is not a leprechaun. This is proved by the fact that the Council of Constance, the Council of Trent and Leo the Thirteenth all condemned the perfidious opinion that God is a leprechaun. It is proved too
by something that Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose of Milan all wrote, and then it is proved by passages from the Scriptures. And to top the proof off, it is proved by reason as cold as Einstein’s, but without the same flair, that the deity could not possibly be a
little person
.’

Maitland laughed, remembering that Costello had used the same blithe method for plumbing the Godhead in his own student days.

Edmonds continued, ‘Everything codified and as organized as a trawler master’s manual. Only God is a little more intangible than a diesel engine.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Maitland. ‘I wish I was as certain as Costello is.’

His left hand had been playing with a volume of letters by an eighteenth-century Jesuit. On some off-chance, his eye consulted the page and saw ‘To Sister Marie-Therese de Viomenil, Perpignan, 1740.’

‘Listen to this,’ he told Edmonds. He read, ‘“What I have always most dreaded has just happened to me. I have not been able to get out of accepting an office contrary to all my likings and for which I believe myself to have no aptitude. In vain I groaned, prayed, offered to spend the rest of my life in the novitiate-house of Toulouse; the sacrifice, one of the greatest of my life, had to be made. And see how visibly the action of divine Providence appears. When I had made, and repeated, my sacrifice a hundred times, God removed from my heart all my old repugnance so that I left the professed house – and you know how much I loved it – with a certain peace and liberty of spirit at which I was myself astonished. But there is more. On my arrival at Perpignan, I found a quantity of business of which I understand nothing, and many people to see and conciliate: the Bishop, the Intendant, the King’s
Lieutenant, Parliament, and Army Staff. You know my horror of all sorts of formal visits and above all of visiting the great, yet I find that none of this frightens me; I hope that God will supply for everything and I feel a confidence in his divine Providence which keeps me above all these troubles. So I remain calm and in peace in the midst of a thousand worries and complications in which I should have expected, naturally speaking, to be overwhelmed!”

‘There, that wasn’t an arrogant man, nothing like it. Yet he had no doubt that the unknown God took a hand in his interviews with the King’s Lieutenant and staff officers and so on. And I wouldn’t mind betting that the unknown God did.’ Maitland closed the letters with some finality. ‘It’s got me beaten. One thing I’m sure of, and that is that while the arrogant priest might be an object of mockery, he’s quickly becoming supplanted by his brother, the priest who doesn’t know what anything means, who’s a sort of humanist and in whom the only positive element is that he doesn’t believe what Nolan and Costello believe in the way Nolan and Costello believe it. I just don’t know,’ he concluded and threw the Jesuit across onto the bed.

Edmonds shook his head. ‘Anyhow, I don’t think Christ would pass the theology exams here, because he hasn’t read Aquinas and Costello’s lecture notes.’

‘Look, if those young fellows upstairs can be as safe and sure as Costello, then good luck to ’em is what I say.’

‘And I say God help ’em.’

‘No. It’s a sad life for a priest if all he knows is that the old-style religion won’t wash but doesn’t know yet what will. If I’m visibly that way, I’d be better off out of this place.’

‘It’s not as visible as all that.’ Edmonds dropped his large jaws onto his collar and said rumblingly, lest
he seem to be boasting, ‘I suppose I’m an expert at reading signs.’

‘What used you do before you came here?’

‘I was a financial journalist.’ He winked. ‘Good fun.’

‘Are there any other experts at reading the signs here?’

‘Not many.’

‘Thank God.’

One of the things Maitland most hated about the House was that you could never speak for long to anyone without a bell ringing. One rang now below Maitland’s room and above them the burr of words died and the thump of feet succeeded.

‘There is an example of what I wanted – had the hide to want to speak to you about,’ said Edmonds. ‘Monsignor Nolan, when the time comes for him to present the bill to you, will complain that he never liked the evenings you held because they were the cause of keeping some students late for Compline.’

‘I’ve never kept anyone late yet.’

‘You’re keeping me late. I know, I’m keeping myself late. But it’s all the same to the president.’

‘Well, I’m not letting you go. I have some White Horse stabled under the bed. Are you a member of the Sacred Thirst?’

‘Students are forbidden …’ said Edmonds, smiling. ‘It used to be a great life with the press. You’d go round to interview company chairmen about new issues of debenture stock, and the whisky would flow like Niagara.’

‘All right. Stay there and I’ll pour you a shaving-mug full.’

So they were sitting together sipping when Egan ran in.

Egan was not breathless at seeing Maitland and Edmonds drinking together like cronies. He seemed to
have problems of his own. His eyes stared above the blue third-former cheeks and he shivered.

‘I have a problem I must speak to you about,’ he announced. ‘I wonder could you come to my room, Dr Maitland?’

Maitland put the drink down among his notes. But he worried now about how to get rid of Edmonds without resort to status, and in the spirit of their interview. Somehow this was the basic question. For though Egan looked like a rule-making, rule-keeping priest, and though for a student to drink liquor in this house was a massive breach of law, tonight Maurice was there not as a canonist but as a mortal, scared man, swallowing and snorting as no elocutionist would recommend. So that Edmonds was safe from all those covert penalties that can fall on the erring cleric; and safe also from the less covert one of being cast out and sent back to his financial editor.

He downed his whisky at a great pace, seeming inured to it. Maitland and Egan watched his large jaw raised for the work and his gullet joggling slowly between the strong cords of gristle in his throat. He must have decided to enter this House at perhaps the age of twenty-four. Now, five years later, he still looked like a man who knew his way around the bottles and around other things that were mystery to the two priests.

‘Thank you, doctor,’ he said and winked. ‘I’ll have to see a doctor about these fainting fits.’

In Costello’s room, Hurst confessed to being again possessed by the yen for blood sacrifice. The barbarous Hurst, too naïve and too subtle to be quashed by prayer, pressed the knife upon Hurst the neophyte, promised deer-eyed Hurst – Hurst whose face was a pale geography of nervy blemishes – quietus in the gush of blood.

‘You have pandered to yourself mentally,’ Costello told him. ‘Too many high-jinx of the mind, and this happens.’

‘I wasn’t aware …’

‘Look,’ said Costello, trying blitz methods, ‘you’re pampered. You look pampered, you are pampered. You’re the eternal pious youth. Take a pull on yourself or I’ll boot you one, fair and square. You understand?’

But Hurst was too jaded to take any offence, and vapidly accepted his absolution and sleeping-pill.

Costello gave the long absolution with the special care and emphasis the words normally received only in a Hollywood piety epic. He wanted them to strike home.

Egan scarcely waited for Edmonds to be out of the room before asking, ‘Could you come with me now, James? I really can’t afford to be away from my room for a second.’

In the corridor, though, he took the time to draw Maitland into conference in the shadow of one if those terrible pilasters. Behind his head hung a barely perceptible painting of St Jerome in his cave. Its gloom seemed continuous with that of the passage where they stood, and Egan gave the essentially funny impression that he had emerged from the cave and was about to step back inside it. Yet Maitland did not for long feel like laughing.

‘Thank God you’re on hand, Maitland,’ Egan said. ‘The idea of turning to anyone else is impossible.’ He took a gulp of breath. ‘I have to be able to rely on your utter discretion and utter charity. And if you could see your way clear not to ask too many questions …’