Three Cheers For The Paraclete (12 page)

‘Circumstances end our talk,’ said Celia, a sentence worthy of the novel in her hands. In her craggy frame somewhere was hidden the snakes-and-ladders-playing, dolly-tea-partying child sister to whom Nora was now calling. ‘But if you should see Dr Egan within the next few months, tell him it’s either all in or all out. If he
wants to be celibate and heroic, flog her away from him. Some saint did that, didn’t he, to a medieval good-time gel? Or there’s the other alternative. But that wouldn’t work, despite what I said a moment ago, not with Nora. You know, she still wears a scapular. In this day and age! I’ll bet you don’t even wear a scapular.’

Nora called again, ‘Celie!’ But it very nearly seemed that Celia was fonder of her advantage over the enemy than of succouring her wounded.

‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘tell Egan it’s cake or eat it. And next time to do his own deliveries.’

Nora could be heard screaming.

‘God bless
you
, father,’ Celia sang virulently and then slammed the door.

In the car, Egan sat with one hand on the wheel. He peered like a comic getaway man and took a guess. ‘Celia, wasn’t it?’

And Maitland, so vigorously misinformed by that lady, could not help cutting Egan’s apologies mercilessly short. He forgot how willingly he had joined the expedition earlier in the night and had to be chivvied into answering all the questions the little priest had to ask. By the time he had realized how unfair he was being, and how unfair Celia could not help being, it was too late to make anything but full disclosure just. So that Maitland had to tell Egan even the cake-or-eat-it message. The little priest seemed to sink in his seat.

‘She’s dead right, of course,’ he said.

‘She couldn’t be as bitter as that and still be right.’

‘You must think I’m a fine one, James. Though what anyone thinks doesn’t alter things at their source, does it?’

‘No. And I’m under such a large obligation to you.’

‘However do you make that out?’ Egan said, but he didn’t want to be answered, he wanted the idea to stand. ‘I’ll have to go and see that Celia in the morning.’

Maitland most dreaded Egan’s excuses and held himself stiff against their possibility. But, blessedly, travelling home among late talkers and drinkers at the soft narcotic hour of two, even the
defensor
called a truce unto himself.

Egan avoided him. They passed early one morning, each on his way to say Mass at a side altar; and that was all Maitland saw of him for the rest of the week. On that one silent occasion, Egan held his head and shoulders up, as if trying to imply an impossible range of things; his neck grew cords of gristle and his frame seemed striving to say, ‘No, I have not desired Nora Tully nor betrayed my vow with her. I know you don’t think I have, but since I am going to the altar, I want to make it clear that I’m not acting sacrilegiously. Of course, if you don’t think I’ve considered every aspect of the problem, then I don’t really care what you think. However, I know that you aren’t the type …’ And so on.

In fact, Egan had tried to tell Maitland this in so many words, the morning after their Saturday-night stunt.

‘I hope, in fact I know, that you wouldn’t think I’ve –’ He had shaken his head. ‘The trouble is, the words I’ve learnt for a situation like this seem snide now. “Compromise”, “illicit liaison”, “entanglement” …’ He had begun a second time then: ‘I do hope you wouldn’t think I had jeopardized, in any way, my vow of celibacy …’

Maitland objected.

Egan blinked. ‘I’ve already said I know you don’t think along those lines. Just the same, it must be a source of anxiety to any priest to see a colleague saying Mass in a doubtful state of soul, perhaps multiplying sacrileges.’

‘It wouldn’t be my business if you were.’

‘James, I am not multiplying sacrileges.’

‘Good.’

But still the little canon lawyer went on compulsively explaining. For Maitland’s approval meant nothing to him. By his own severe standards he was in jeopardy; by those standards he must judge himself. He wanted and dreaded the glib and final judgment he could have had only from a Costello; he wanted to be declared
not
guilty on the level of a Nolan, for that was his own level, the level his conscience had worked on since boyhood.

T
HROUGHOUT THE WINTER
no friendship other than his unlikely one with Egan developed for Maitland within the house. Just the same, since his sermon of some Sundays before, his standing with the staff had gained. With some of them he went to see a film, with others to an international football match. Early or late, though, he would be nonplussed when they boasted of their new number-two irons or discussed restaurants. His sense of fitness, being nine-tenths pride and essentially working-class, made him wonder what was the sense in risking hell or its equivalent by becoming a priest if, like everyone else, you knew what was par on expensive golf courses and commended cynical waiters on the filet mignon.

He felt cheated too when their legalism transformed them momentarily into ciphers. Such as the night Costello introduced for discussion a question he had been asked that same afternoon. A girl had been walking home the evening before when a man attacked and raped her. A doctor had telephoned to ask Costello whether a person was justified in treating the girl in such a way as to prevent a possible pregnancy.

‘Of course, I referred him to Monsignor Nolan, who happened to be out. But I told him I was sure that, however fortunately, the answer was no, he couldn’t treat her in that way. Agreed?’

He made an adenoidal noise and stirred his coffee, and the gentle lighting of the parlour was trapped in each crystal of his glasses. Anguish did not penetrate their cheery rimlessness; he had no notion of the stew of heartbreak he stirred with his coffee-spoon. Like any specialist, he could not afford adverting to such things.

Some of the priests made gestures of assent. Maitland watched Egan, who merely reached for a biscuit.

‘What do you think, Maurice?’ Costello asked.

Maurice didn’t particularly want to say. At last he did, reluctantly. ‘It’s an unfortunate case. It’s one of those border cases where to keep to principle may seem barbarous in a human sense. However, you’re right. Conception could well have taken place. Just the same …’

‘Catholics get used to stomaching the unfortunate,’ Costello said, making a face as he downed his mocha. ‘What about you, James? You’re the humanist of the group.’ He persisted in trying out such barely ironic phrases on Maitland, and Maitland let him, in indemnity of the Couraigne prize incident.

‘I’m glad it’s not my responsibility.’

‘But if it was?’

‘I don’t want to buy into the fight, thanks.’

‘Well, I thought I’d get a real rough-house discussion going on this. But the others could scarcely care less. Come on, James, it’s up to you.’

‘No, I’m prejudiced.’

‘In what way?’ Costello demanded.

‘I find it impossible to believe that anything that might be there is a human being with human rights.’

But Maitland’s unspoken prejudice arose from his being the only one his mother did not miscarry. For all her losses, whenever they occurred – in the first, fourth, seventh month – she wept, above all because they had not been baptized. He resented that her grief should
have arisen in this way, more or less on the authority of theologians. Such as Costello.

‘Ah,’ said Costello, ‘but it may well be a human with human rights. What is there may well have an immortal soul. No one knows just when the soul
is
infused. Who would want to take the risk on their consciences?’

‘I don’t know,’ Maitland confessed energetically and with an edge of anger. ‘As I say, I don’t have to know, because people with a problem of this size always ask an expert. Thank God!’

Costello pushed his hand outwards and palm up. The gesture was meant to imply the artlessness of the hand’s owner. ‘Look, Maitland, I’m not trying to rib you. Tell me what you think. It’s a shame when a man can’t have a spot of controversy with his coffee.’

Without warning, the young priest was blind with anger at this man who was willing to damn a girl over the telephone, but could not forgo an argument with his supper.

‘Very well then, doctor. I think that it is more than barbarous in a merely human sense to make that girl risk bearing such a child. I think such a thing is
essentially
barbarous. I think that the risk of any minute organism which the doctor might remove being human is ludicrously tiny. And on the basis of such a tiny or non-existent risk, I can’t see that it’s justified to chance the future ruin of both this
real
girl and any child she
may
bear. I’m sorry if this shocks you, doctor, and, as you say, you’re the expert. But you wanted my opinion and that’s it.’

Everyone in the room had listened and now sucked it over.

One of them said, ‘But that’s very risky, James.’

‘Perhaps it is. I don’t know. Thank God I don’t have to think that sort of thing through.’

‘You can’t,’ Costello told him, ‘enshrine a principle such as that the unborn foetus is sacred, and then chuck it out the door as soon as it looks edgy.’

‘She’d surely get the grace to bear this appalling thing,’ someone decided.

‘It’s hard,’ another said, ‘but a thing like that could make a woman a saint!’

Only vestigial good manners kept Maitland in the room.

Joe Quinlan, his cousin, had apparently been found bewildered among the pines, terraces, shrines and rockeries. By the time some student had brought him into the House and left him at Maitland’s door, all the native dispassion he had shown that other afternoon had left him. Maitland found him on guard, sniffing the air, ready to run.

‘Hell,’ Joe said. ‘What do you do for sunlight?’

So far out of his habitat, he seemed much more willing to be amenable. He said that Morna and the children were in the town below, doing the shops over. He leered and winked and said that he didn’t want to upset the apple cart by bringing a good sort like Morna into the place. Maitland saw all this with nostalgia: the wink, the leer, the Saturday sports shirt and coat, the Saturday face ready for the pub, the races, the football or, more likely, the report of these things. Joe was a pungent reminder of Maitland’s own father, of Saturdays when, since nothing ever happened, everything seemed possible.

‘What I came to see you about, father, is these thieving swine.’

He passed a newspaper advertisement to Maitland. It showed the family that Joe and Morna would like to become romping on a subdivided hill above a forest.
You could have land on the hill for a hundred dollars down and fifty a month. Maitland had a vision of Joe and Morna arriving on the hill, Joe in his blatantly tatty sports coat, and being sirred and madamed all afternoon by some merciless agent; and going home feeling that they had gained a stake in the world.

Joe said, ‘I paid what they say there, and paid each month, and then I got a letter from them announcing as if I’d won the lottery, saying how I’d now qualified to take out a mortgage with some other company. Well, I went along to the mortgage company and they say I have to pay more than seventy dollars a month for the next seven years at a big interest rate. They say I signed to do it when I signed the first contract, but the bastard who sold us the land didn’t tell us. You know. So we thought we’d be paying fifty a month for three years or so, but now we’re paying seventy for seven years.’

He shifted on his buttocks to say, just audibly, ‘Swine.’

Maitland continued frowning over the advertisement. Joe pressed him.

‘Well, it says fifty dollars a month at seven per cent, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. It says from fifty dollars.’

‘
From
,’ Joe hissed. He was startled that a preposition could, with so little apparent truculence, turn on a man. ‘It doesn’t say seventy a month at twelve per cent. And it’s a different type of per cent too.’

‘Flat?’

‘That’s right. In this
great
country!’

‘It’s wrong as can be,’ Maitland conceded. ‘Have you the contract you signed when you bought the land?’

Joe had it in his coat pocket. There were grease marks on it as if he and Morna had worried over it at meal-times.

‘I tell you, that mortgage office, you’ve got no idea. Carpet like a Hilton hotel and them squiggle-paintings all over the walls and little tarts with short haircuts running all over the place with folders. And the whole place full of people whining because they’ve been had. Like me.’

Maitland made a variety of promises. The following week, he took Joe’s contract to a solicitor recommended by Egan. The solicitor sighed professionally as soon as he opened it, and then let it fall on the desk.

‘I know this by heart,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing can be done. People should never sign any contract in real estate until it’s been sighted by a lawyer. It’s the old story of fools and angels. This is a contract for fools.’

Maitland told him, ‘There are people who have never seen a solicitor in their lives. They can’t be expected to be absolutely wise with their unexpected windfalls. What I mean is, with all respect, joy is a more basic reaction than the urge to seek a solicitor.’

‘Oh, yes, yes, yes,’ the lawyer agreed shortly. ‘But the world we live in, the world …!’

‘What if he, my cousin, refuses to pay any more?’

‘They can sue him for damages.’

‘They can. Will they?’

‘At this stage, yes. I reckon that later on, after he’s paid a good amount, they might let him go.’

‘A good amount is all this man owns in the world.’

The lawyer sighed, opened the document, read a few lines, which confirmed all his sad wisdom, and shut both eyes migrainously.

‘And the price of it, anyhow,’ Maitland murmured. ‘In this country …’

At which flaccid comment the lawyer frowned even more deeply but kept his eyes largely closed.

‘Oh,’ Maitland hurried to explain. ‘I’ve been away
for some years. When I left, which was more than three years ago, that district must have been all poor scrub …’

‘Worth as little as six hundred dollars an acre. I know, father. But since then the happy day has dawned when it was declared non-rural and, behold, the companies knew – in fact, they’d been buying it up for months before, often through dummy buyers. Then in went the bulldozers and shaved the whole area –’ he sketched razed downs with his hand – ‘engineers built roads that would fall into holes within two years, and another terrible suburb was born.’

On Maitland’s way downstairs, the lawyer’s last sentence woke in him not only a barren anger but the memory of some lines of Ezra Pound’s:

It was a very rhetorical poem he used to recite while shaving in his room in Louvain. As he waited for a bus, he began to add his own riders to the poem. With usura, he decided, the land was made desert and tracked with – as the lawyer had said – minimum standard concrete; with usura the engineer was made futile, the seller forced to prey, the buyer harrowed, the usurer gorged with easy money; the short-haired tarts Joe spoke of served Moloch and did his cancerous paperwork. With usura.

The next day, one of these young ladies led him into the office of the Allied Projects Development Company’s chief accountant. He was greeted in a manner he had come to hate by a man about forty. The greeting said, ‘We’re all professional men together and know the price of fish. Besides which, some of my best friends are Catholics and Monsignor X has money
invested in us. Your
company
, if I can call it that, and ours are two of the pillars that keep the sky up.’

Maitland refused an offered cigarette. ‘I won’t waste your time,’ he said. He told Joe’s story. ‘I think he should be refunded his money, and if that isn’t done, I shall warn people against your type of business from the pulpit or anywhere else available.’

The accountant licked his lips, bemusedly, as if they were caked with that salt which is the salt of the earth.

‘Come now, father. We’re a respectable company, our prices are quite reasonable by comparison. Our auditor is a papal knight …’

And the orderly clash of typewriters and comptometers in the office made Maitland suspect that he was lost with grievance no one would understand. He would therefore need to stand by his first view of the matter; he would not cease to be angry. So he remained and kept saying his say; and was at length led across a floor peopled with clerks and long-legged girls who knew what they were hunting for in the steel cabinets and among ribboned deeds on the shelves. The inner Maitland shrank from their professionalism. Beyond them, through an avenue of abstracts, the managing director lived in a teak office.

He frowned all the time.

‘No,’ he said to Maitland, ‘it would be very foolish to do that. We’re well established and respected. Our auditor is a papal knight.’

‘That’s the second time I’ve heard that, and it leaves me singularly unimpressed. If I’m willing to accept that Pope Alexander the Sixth had a number of bastard children, I’m willing to accept that a papal knight would work with you. What is of basic importance is the weapon of deceit this advertisement is.’

The accountant, leaning on the managing director’s personal Chubb, was stung.

‘Now, I don’t think you should take advantage of your collar, father. I think there should be a gentlemen’s agreement not to bandy insults.’

‘This is a weapon of deceit. When I say that I don’t intend to insult
you
but to define
it
.’

‘Each profession has different standards,’ the managing director explained. There was a weariness about him that implied he had often given these same explanations, perhaps even to himself. ‘If a maker of toilet soap claims that by using his soap any girl can make men interested in her, no one objects. It’s a convention of the trade. The same with our claims. No one would seriously think you could buy land on those terms.’

‘If no one would seriously think so, why make the claims.’

‘It’s a convention. Besides, we say
from
a hundred dollars down,
from
seven per cent. That’s the base line, the starting point. After one of our clients has demonstrated his reliability by adhering to these basic terms, he qualifies for a mortgage with a sister company of ours called Investment General Corp. Now, I’m sure our man-in-the-field explained all this to your cousin.’