Be Near Me (18 page)

'It wasn't five minutes, it was another world,' said Father Michael. 'Different from this one.'

'It was just the same,' said Angela. 'The same powers in the West trying to dominate everybody else. Making war for their own profit.'

'Exactly,' said Father Damian. 'You may have changed sides but the same agenda informs what's happening.'

'That's right,' said Angela. 'It's definitely a political agenda.'

'Look,' I said. 'We wanted America to leave the people of Vietnam to build their own society. But now? There are leaders in the Middle East harming their own people. A nest of caliphs. They want nuclear weapons. People who are not merely sentimental in their politics will see that we must gather our forces to prevent them. It is a dirty job.'

'It's immoral!' said Father Damian. 'We have no right.'

'People will die,' I said. 'And people in the likes of Texas will be allowed to feel their lives are more important. But many of those Middle Eastern leaders are fascists. Those terrorists are fascists. They have no sense of the value of life, and if we are civilised people then we will help the people of Iraq or Iran or the Sudan out of the dark. It is our moral duty.'

'Man alive,' said Angela. 'Moral duty? I didn't realise I had been invited to the Republican National Convention.'

She put down her glass as if the wine suddenly appalled her.

'Nobody agrees with him,' said Father Damian. 'Nobody here.'

'I agree with him,' said Father Michael. 'You are not thinking about the issue. You are only thinking about the consistency of your own positions, and that is totally narrow. We know Saddam fears democracy. We know he hurts his own people.'

'On whose evidence?' said Angela. 'We were selling him arms only a couple of years ago. It's a terrible dichotomy.'

'We should be ashamed of having armed them or having appeased them,' said Father Michael. 'But we are where we are. And we have been here before. These dictators want to hurt people and now they want nuclear weapons and they have to be stopped or else we are cowards and not worthy of our resolutions.'

'What are you two
thinking
?' she said, and you could tell from the look on her charming face that she simply didn't believe it was possible for anybody to say what Michael had just said. 'America at the moment is only about self-interest. The children on the streets could tell you that.'

'And we should listen to them,' said Father Damian.

'You're promoting a religious war,' said Angela. 'It's not about the poor people of the Middle East. It's about oil.'

'Do you mind?' said Mr McCallum, and he reached his arm over for the Musigny.

'By all means,' I said.

'It's about protecting Israel,' said Father Damian.

'Israel is a rather unfortunate nation,' I said, 'with rather unfortunate leaders. But I think you are wrong. It is about
protecting people from being gassed by their own leaders. It is about protecting women from being executed in public places. And it is about stopping terrorists and unstable governments from getting their hands on these weapons, weapons that Iraq and Iran would certainly seek to use, if they had them. We are not being mature if we imagine what these governments seek is a nuclear deterrent.'

'There are no weapons!' said Angela and Father Damian, almost in unison.

'They have these weapons in their minds,' said Father Michael. 'And that is enough for me and should be enough for anybody.'

'Excuse me, pal,' said Father Damian.

'Yes,' said the social worker, growing flushed. 'There's an irony here, in that the only country ever to use one of your weapons is America.'

'History is imperfect,' I said. 'And so is America. But the world is too dangerous now. We may, each of us, have to trade in a little of our old idealism for the sake of new realities.'

'This is disgusting,' said Father Damian. 'You are blind. We have joined the Americans, trying to capitalise on a situation, trying to get a foothold in the Middle East, trying to protect their own interests. America used the thing in New York as an excuse for an invasion. You're blind if you don't see that. We had Iraq in our sights for years. The Americans scared everybody into thinking the Iraqis had chemical weapons ready to explode in every city in the West. You're
blind.
'

'There are good reasons...' said Father Michael.

'No, there are not!' said Father Damian. 'They're all despicable.'

His plate was almost untouched and he seemed to include it and everything around it in his denunciation. He raised his voice again.

'Our government has lost the plot. You have lost the plot. We nurtured these nutcases over there, and now that it's no longer in our interests we want to bomb them. There are no weapons.'

'There may be,' I said.

'There are none! We have been lied to. There are no suitcases exploding in Washington. It's all a fantasy, a shocking fantasy. And people like you are propping it up. Let us say the Iraqi government is no good. Well, it's the business of the people of Iraq to mobilise against it. Not us, forcing our views on cultures we barely understand. I'll tell you something, Father. It's arrogance. Nothing but arrogance. And we'll pay for it, a thousand-fold. We are currently tramping over ancient religious places. Not my religion. Not yours, either. But you talk about people living in darkness. This will unleash the darkness. It already has. Just you wait.'

'David,' said the Bishop, joining his hands, 'we must not ignore what our vocation tells us. It tells us to understand the hate in the eyes of our enemies. We have not done that, in this case. We have not sought to understand ourselves or them. America has simply closed its eyes and pulled the trigger, and we have followed them in that. We have flattered ourselves into thinking there is nothing to understand, but
that is no way to defend ourselves. That is an offensive action. Everything we have done speaks of some smallness of vision. That is where we are. And in the process we have not lessened hatred—not at all. We have increased hatred and made it noble in the eyes of millions.'

'It was always noble in their eyes.'

'You believe that?'

'We have arrived at different places, Gerard,' I said. 'Out of the past, we have come to different places. My view has not changed, or not much. The vista has changed, and what we are looking at is not the same as Vietnam.'

'You are blind,' said Angela. 'This is serious. We're in a really problematic situation here.'

'It does the Church no favours,' said Father Damian, 'that we should be harbouring people who think such things, support such hatred.'

'Harbour?' said Father Michael. He leaned his elbows among the bottles and looked straight at his colleague. 'Forgive me, but people like you will do anything before you'll renovate your views. You'll
say
anything before you'll ask yourself a difficult question.'

Father Damian looked at me as if I was responsible for a possible rift with the older gentleman.

'The difference between now and the past,' he said, 'the past that you have turned your backs on, is that America has now forced the world into being a place that is dominated by some fairly primitive notions of good and evil. You're either with them or against them. You're either part of their good or an ally of evil forces.'

'You're a Catholic priest,' I said. 'Isn't that what we always believed ourselves? Isn't that our creed?'

'Rubbish!'

'Really? I don't think so. We spend our days being rather certain about where goodness lies and where evil prevails.'

'Good and evil,' said the Bishop. 'Too much for one supper.'

'No basis for foreign policy,' said Angela.

'Well, it's our policy in everything else,' I said.

Bishop Gerard looked down and ran a fingernail along the edge of his napkin, before looking up, not quite at me, and smiling broadly.

'Scotland has always been a socialist country,' he said. 'And some forms of wisdom are hard to import. Perhaps the English, perhaps the Americans have lost some sense of subtlety when it comes to the handling of good and evil. We see it differently here in Scotland.'

'Don't be patronising, Gerard,' I said. 'Perhaps the people of Scotland are above their own nationalist fixations. Young Scottish men have died over there.'

'Yes,' he said. 'We continue to pray for them.'

'Indeed,' I said.

'Don't fret about it, David,' he said. 'You have many people on your side. You even have some Scots on your side: the cabinet is filled with them. Scotsmen of some description.'

The table was nodding in agreement, except Father Michael, and I had the feeling that anything I might say could only serve to make my guests more satisfied with themselves and their certainties.

'I hate your assumptions,' said Angela. 'From where I'm sitting, the Americans seem like the biggest terrorists of all.'

'Aye,' said Father Damian. 'You don't
get
it, our way of thinking. We can judge for ourselves what is good and what is evil.'

'In a town like this,' I said, 'with the history of bigotry and Orangeism and everything else, you're going to give me a lecture about the fair-mindedness of the Scottish people? About their working-class camaraderie and feeling for the international poor? Their native opposition to economic self-interest? Their inclusiveness?'

'Ha!' said Mr McCallum.

'In the name of Jesus, Gerard,' I said. 'A girl in Glasgow had her throat cut in broad daylight the other month for wearing a Celtic scarf. Two asylum seekers were thrown off the top of a block of flats not ten miles from here. You know why? Because they were not from around here. Please spare me your homily about the glory of the tribe.'

'Oh, the tribe,' said Mr McCallum, drunkenly. 'That's a good one.'

Events often move more slowly in the memory than they do in life. As I remember it, the dinner, which had started in my mind as a showcase of personal delights, moved achingly towards discord, but really we covered many topics that night and there was laughter at the table. Ms Path had a wonderful manner of chivvying the men's religious certainties with counter-dogmas of the feminist kind. As I collected the plates and made my way to the kitchen to get pudding, she rolled a cigarette and lobbed one of her infelicities in the direction of Father Damian. 'It's ironic,' she said, 'that your
Pope has so much time for the Virgin Mary. You'd have thought her being of the female persuasion might have bothered him.'

'What you saying?' asked Father Damian. 'The Church doesn't approve of women?'

'You prefer saints,' she said. 'Bless the Pope. But he's much more understanding of celestial bodies than he is of women's.

'That's polytechnic speak,' he said, at which point, not unfunnily, her side of the table became a hubbub of statistics and dichotomies. Bishop Gerard spoke of a visit he had recently made to Rome and of a meeting with Pope John Paul at which the old man had sat on a chair lower than the Bishop's. 'That's the sort of man he is,' said Gerard.

In the kitchen, I looked down at the board and decided the cheese was too
recherché
for its waiting audience, so I took the stranger things away, meaning the French and English cheeses, leaving among the muscat grapes a clump of cheddars that reeked of the Western Isles. Next to the kettle my mobile was beeping to show a text had arrived. I hadn't seen the young people for a week, but they were the only ones who sent me texts. The beeping phone felt like a gift. It turned out the message came from Lisa's phone and I remember being disappointed at how short it was:

It's Mark. Watch out 4 cops. I'm sorry.

And I wrote back:

How come?

As I organised the bowls and opened a Beaumes de Venise, there was silence from the phone. Mark had never again mentioned the night we ended up in the rectory, the night of the dancing and the kiss. I thought it was just like the text: he had my attention for a second or two before dropping me for something more instant and vivid. 'Oh, Mark,' I thought, 'what on earth have you got to be sorry about?' And I glanced at the window and thought of them out there in the dark.

'David,' said the Bishop, 'do you ever hear anything from your old monks, the ones from Ampleforth?'

'I don't,' I said. 'I never hear of them. There were one or two very good ones. To be honest, one never thinks of school now.'

'David went to a very good school.'

'It was a long time ago,' I said.

'A famous one,' he said. 'Down in Yorkshire.'

'It's all in the past,' I said.

'I don't think so,' said Father Damian, pressing his bowl forward and putting a balled-up napkin in the middle. He winked horribly. 'You still have a touch of the lobster salad about you, Father.' He laughed at this and solicited grim chuckles from his neighbours, and I knew my lips had grown so thin as to form a line under the possibility of any future interaction with that boring little man.

'Well, that is to our benefit this evening,' said Bishop Gerard.

I wasn't wise and I knew it. A less disaffected person than myself, a more reliable person, would have known easily how to placate the priest from Dairy, how to flatter his small notions and deliver him somewhat from his native aggression. He wasn't a tall order. A few simple manoeuvres would have calmed him down. But I know too much about how life-smothering people like that are, how seedy in their negative requirements, and so I gave him the full force of the snob he craved. 'In this house,' I said to him over the cheeseboard, 'we pass the port clockwise.'

'In this country,' he said, 'we don't drink port.'

Father Damian stared at me with pity, and I knew in that second that he and I had not the merest understanding of one another, and that in itself was a kind of understanding.

The Bishop dropped his napkin onto the table and clasped his hands together. 'We have circumnavigated the globe this evening,' he said, 'and here we are back in Scotland once more. Thank you for such an ample supper, David. We are a generous people ourselves and we mark generosity in others.'

Father Damian was staring into space.