The Gospel Of Judas (21 page)

He watched her roll off the bed and pad, plump and clumsy, across the room to the door – her pale, awkward buttocks with their dark dividing crease; her thick waist
and loose thighs; the way she moved, which was hers alone and which, at that moment, repelled him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he called after her.

She looked back at him lying on the bed. ‘Forget it. For God’s sake don’t worry. The last thing I need is apology.’ There was an edge of anger in her tone.

‘What
do
you need?’

She laughed humourlessly. ‘Who knows? You, I suppose. The thought frightens you, doesn’t it?’ She turned away and went to the bathroom without waiting for him to answer.

The phone rang the next morning. He didn’t have to get to the Institute before eleven o’clock and he was at home doing little or nothing, just reading an article that he was reviewing for
Papyrology Today
, taking refuge in the quotidian. The phone gave its intrusive petulant sound that would never take no for an answer and he assumed it would be her. He picked up the receiver. ‘Madeleine?’

There was a silence on the other end. ‘Is this Father Leo Newman?’ A voice of limpid, crystalline tones, the tones of Oxford and the English College, the tones of the hierarchy. ‘Am I speaking to Father Leo Newman?’

He felt a small spurt of panic, something physical just below his diaphragm. He closed his eyes. ‘Yes, this is Leo Newman.’

‘I have Bishop Quentin on the line for you, Father.’

The voice left him to sweat in the stillness of the morning. After a while someone else came on the other end, the tones
of Maynooth this time, urbane, jovial, threatening. ‘Leo, my dear, how are you?’ They’d had trouble tracking him down. They hadn’t been sure where he was. They were concerned, worried, anxious about one of their number who had strayed in the wilderness, less concerned over the ninety and nine who were safely in the sheep pen. ‘I think we ought to meet for a chat, Leo,’ the Bishop said. ‘To talk things over. I think you owe it to yourself, and to me.’

‘I’m waiting for a call from Jerusalem. I don’t know that I can get away.’

‘I think perhaps you ought to.’

Madeleine came round that afternoon. She had rung during the morning to fix a time. ‘Jack’s flight gets in this evening,’ she had said. ‘We can be together for a bit.’ But when she let herself into the flat her manner was hurried and distracted: things had gone wrong with her arrangements; Jack was due back earlier. She had telephoned the office to check and she had discovered that he had got a seat on an earlier flight, so she couldn’t stay long. ‘The best laid plans of mice and men …’ she said, divesting herself of coat and bag of shopping.

‘It’s “schemes”. The best laid schemes …’

‘Pedant. I’ll have to make up some story if I’m late, shopping I’d forgotten to do or something. Here, I’ve brought you a present.’

He watched as she unwrapped one of her packages. It contained different blends of tea – lapsang souchong, green gunpowder, absurd names like that.

She came up to him and wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest. ‘Am I forgiven?’ she asked. As though they were in that stuffy
confessional once again and she was asking for absolution.

‘Forgiven for what?’

‘I was unkind yesterday.’

‘Were you?’

‘It was the first time. First times can be difficult.’

‘Can they? You sound as though there have been many.’ Was she practised in all this, he wondered – the hurried telephone calls, the assignations, the gifts? Did she know about it all?

She was very still, holding herself against him and not daring to move. ‘A few. Does it shock you?’

‘There’s not much that shocks me,’ he said. ‘Priests are remarkably unshockable. What would Jack do if he found out about us?’

‘Jack?’ She seemed surprised by the name. She looked up at him, her faintly furrowed brow with its scattering of pale freckles mere inches below his face. ‘He will eventually, won’t he? I mean, we can’t keep up this kind of deceit for ever. People get a sense of something being up. They know.’

‘Do they?’

‘Oh yes, assuredly they do.’

‘And then?’

She shrugged, releasing him from her arms, turning to the table and putting things in order, the things that she had brought with her. ‘He’ll probably be awfully understanding. He is, you know. It’s a dreadful word to use, but Jack is awfully
nice
. I suppose I should say decent. Very decent, very civilised, very English. He’d probably comfort
me
if he knew.’

The word
know
, that strange Biblical euphemism. Leo knew her, knew the smell of her and the taste, knew that
imperfect concoction of flesh and fur that was her body; but with surprise he realised that he no longer knew the person within. Intimate physical knowledge had somehow chased away any previous understanding he had of her. What did he know of her life with her husband? What did he know of the secret life that was hers and his, the affective life that drives a marriage, the libido that drives a woman? What went on between the sheets? He noticed that her accent had become more accentuated as she spoke about her husband, as though in the act of praising him she was also distancing herself from his supposed Englishness, his decency. To go with the scent of exotic tea there was the pungent smell of hypocrisy.

‘Calder phoned me this morning,’ he told her, wanting to move away from such dangerous ground.

‘Calder?’

‘The people in Jerusalem. They want me back. I put them off for the moment, but I’ll have to go sooner or later.’

‘Have to?’

‘This papyrus. If I want to be involved.’

‘And do you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘So you’ll abandon me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

She laughed, as though to diffuse the fear, as though to show that it was no more than a joke. ‘I must go now. I’ll give you a ring as soon as I can.’

He had kept his real news until last, until she was halfway to the door. ‘And I’ve been summoned to London,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’

She stopped. ‘Summoned?’

‘By my bishop.’

‘They can’t know about us.’

‘I think they feel I’m straying from the straight and narrow.’

‘And they’re trying to pull you back.’

‘Something like that. There’s the scroll too. Maybe they’ve heard about that.’

‘Why can’t they leave you alone?’ Her eyes seemed bright with tears, her composure fractured. ‘Why can’t they leave you to make your own decisions?’

‘They have their rights, don’t they?’

‘What in God’s name do you mean by that?’

‘Nothing. It’s their duty, that’s all. You can’t blame them.’

‘Meaning you can blame me?’

‘I’m not blaming anyone. I expected it sooner or later and I’ve got to face up to it.’

‘What’ll you say to them? What’ll you say about us, I mean?’

‘I don’t know what I’ll say.’

‘When are you going?’

‘I told you. Tomorrow. At eleven.’

‘Tomorrow! Where will you stay?’

‘With the Jesuits at Farm Street. They’re good with apostates.’

‘Is that what you are?’

He shook his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know, Madeleine. I just don’t know.’

She watched him thoughtfully, brow puckered, lower lip gently bitten. He himself had bitten that lip and tasted its determination. ‘Leo,’ she asked, ‘do you still believe?’ The question was quite unexpected, quite shocking, in fact. Their relationship has been built on a shaky foundation of allusion and joke, not on a substantial discussion of matters of faith.

‘Believe?’

‘In God, in Christ, in any of what you are still wedded to. You know what I mean. That scroll. Me. Has all that blown everything away?’

He shrugged. ‘Belief doesn’t just evaporate.’

‘Doesn’t it? That’s exactly what it seems to do in my experience. Evaporate, like a lake or something drying up, leaving nothing behind but mud flats and a few dirty puddles and a musty smell of superstition. You remember that time I came to make my confession? Well that was almost my last moment of faith. I guess the lake had become a small pond but hadn’t yet degenerated into a puddle.’

‘So I let you down in your moment of need?’

‘Not at all. You gave me something new to believe in. And you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I don’t know the answer.’

‘Can’t tell pond from puddle, is that it?’ She laughed, but it was one of her humourless laughs, a bitter thing. ‘We can’t go on like this, Leo,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘What alternative do we have?’

‘Oh, there’s an alternative all right. You leave the priesthood, I leave Jack.’

‘You couldn’t.’

‘Of course I could. I think maybe it’s you that couldn’t.’

He ignored the barb. ‘What about the children?’

‘I can see the children during the holidays. That’s almost all I do anyway.’

‘How can you
say
that?’

‘Because it’s dead simple, Leo,’ she replied, and the faint touch of her accent was sharpened by emotion. ‘The children take second place. Does that sound dreadful? But it’s true. Underneath it all there’s you, and there’s only you. That’s what love means.’

‘I thought love was selfless.’

‘That just shows where you are wrong, you poor deluded fool. Love is the most selfish thing in the world. That’s why the Church still demands celibacy.’ She smiled at him and shook her head sorrowfully. ‘You don’t want this, do you, Leo? You don’t want this to go any further.’

Leo breathed. He was startled by the difficulty, the physical effort required. As though he had lost the knack. He breathed deeply and watched her watching him, and he felt that in some way, absurdly, his new knowledge of her made her less accessible, less familiar. She was no longer a friend, a companion, someone with whom he could share his amusement. She was an unknown territory into which he had intruded, an island of conceit and concern. He had no reference points, no landmarks, nothing to guide him in this confused place of desire and revulsion. Love, he understood, was a Janus emotion. He loved her and loathed her at one and the same time. ‘Can’t we step back,’ he asked absurdly. ‘Can’t we go back to where we were?’

But there is no going back, there is no undoing. He knew that without her having to say it for him. You cannot unremember, you cannot unravel the warp and weft of experience. You cannot unbury your dead. He knew that well enough, knew it even as she laughed derisively at his idea. ‘Is that really what you’d like?’

‘It’s not a matter of what I’d like,’ he said.

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s a matter of what I
am
. Maybe I’m crippled, perhaps that’s it. Damaged by a lifetime of celibacy. Maybe some part of you atrophies. Love of one particular person is a very different thing to manage than love of humanity in general.’

‘But I don’t think you
do
love humanity in general. I think
you rather despise humanity. I think that over the years you have learned to love only Leo Newman, that’s the trouble. And trying to love Madeleine Brewer is a bit of a shock.’ Her eyes were sharp and bright, and her smile sat awkwardly on her face, as though it might suddenly slide off and fall to the floor. ‘Leo Newman,’ she said, ‘do you love me as I love you?’ Her words had a strange echo about them, a sense of ritual. She might have been quoting from an obscure liturgy with which he was only half familiar.

‘I don’t know. I don’t
know
how you love me.’

That little laugh had once intrigued him. ‘That’s always been the way. That has always been the whole problem between a man and a woman. No one ever does know. You just muddle along and hope, and every now and again you have the fleeting illusion that you
do
know, that you both love each other in the same way and to the same extent.’ She came over to him and put her hands up to his shoulders and reached up on tiptoe to kiss him, very softly, on the lips. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow if you like.’

‘Take me?’

‘Yes, take you. To the airport. Can’t I drive you to the airport?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose you can.’

‘I’ll come round first thing.’

She kissed him again. He tasted the wetness of her lips and the bitterness of her saliva, and felt the flagrant intimacy of her tongue inside his mouth. And then she had gone, and he could hear her shoes clipping down the stairs.

He had barely dressed when she arrived next morning. She came in announced only by the sound of her key in the door, as though the place were hers as much as his, as though she belonged. A banal greeting. A kiss on the cheek.

‘You’re early.’

She shrugged. ‘I thought I’d get here in good time. I guessed the condemned man would be up bright and early.’

‘Is that what I am?’

‘Aren’t you about to face the Inquisition?’

‘The Inquisition, what’s left of it, is here in Rome. I’m just going to speak to my bishop.’

‘But it’s only the beginning, isn’t it? The beginning of a long and complicated process.
Auto-da-fé
, isn’t that what it is?’ Opening the window she climbed out on to the terrace. She made the same little gasp as she emerged into the view, the same sound that she had made when they
had first looked the place over together – mere weeks ago in measured time but an aeon, a light-year, infinity in any other dimension. She stood at the parapet with her back to him, like a passenger at the taffrail of a ship looking out over the pitching, tossing ocean. The breeze caught her hair and threw it about, so that she put up a hand to control it. He could see cords of tendon beneath the pearly skin of her hand, and the thin lines of veins as blue as smoke. ‘You can see right through the lantern on Saint Peter’s,’ she said. ‘Have you noticed that? You can see the sky through the lights.’

‘That’s exactly where the sun is setting at the moment. It shines right through just as it goes down. I suppose that’s just for one or two days in the year.’

‘Maybe that means something.’

‘What? What on earth
could
it mean?’

She stood looking at the view. Perhaps she was trying to picture this sunset behind the lantern, shards of light throwing the delicate structure into silhouette, the flare seeming to consume the stonework for those few moments. Then she turned round and confronted him across the small terracotta strip of terrace. ‘We have plenty of time before we need to go,’ she said. ‘I came early on purpose, don’t you realise that?’