Three Cheers For The Paraclete (15 page)

‘Then why …? Not that you could involve yourself anyway. Not an official of the chancery.’

‘I trust your judgment, James. If you say these people are execrable, they are.’

Nor was Maitland accustomed to having his
judgment fêted. In carnival mood, he sat down to brew coffee for his friend.

On the following Monday, His Grace telephoned him once more and said, ‘I’ve sought advice, James.’ He kept on interrupting himself with short hacks of coughing and Maitland missed parts of sentences as the prelatial cold rumbled down the wires. ‘… consulted that lawyer fellow … meeting of the trustees and diocesan counsellors for tomorrow afternoon. I can take it for granted we’ll be getting rid of that stock.’

S
O THAT THE
next morning Maitland was firmly persona grata again. He was glad. To live in that grey elephant of a house on any other terms would have been a test of sanity he did not wish to undergo. Yet his success had its blemishes, as when Costello bombarded him with applause. Nolan, having carried so funereal a face on the question, kept clear. It was not until two mornings later, himself and Maitland passing vested for Mass and bearing chalices in the corridor behind the high altar, that Nolan smiled with an aged wistfulness and whispered, ‘So you talked His Grace round to your view of things.’

During that brief springtime when Maitland seemed to bear His Grace’s cachet, Costello came to him a second time and said, ‘It seems there’s a nun in St Thomasine’s College – that’s across the city. She’s apparently a little unorthodox, but the mother-superior has tended to be tolerant of her. However, two parents have complained now, and mother is shaken. His Grace is so far on your side over this other matter that he wants you to be one of the three members of a sort of informal inquiry.’

Maitland, caught in his shirtsleeves and in contemplative mood, said, ‘I’m not a good inquisitor.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll be there. I’ve done this sort of
thing before. You just sit back and look as magisterial as all get-out and learn the ropes.’

Moored on a hill against a high wind and vibrant south-easting clouds, St Thomasine’s was neither as huge nor as Thomas Love Peacock as the House of Studies, yet fit to make hysterical any girl returning from summer holidays. Down to the last digit on its crass garden statuary, it seemed exemplary, the last place to harbour a radical nun. Inside was the browning winter light of institutions, waiting for them in the parlour like something they had been unsuccessful at leaving at home. Also waiting were Monsignor Fleming, the third member of the committee, and the mother-superior. Both were young sixty-year-olds. Their serge clothing lapped them about in unchallengeable snugness as they spoke of the signs of decline, angina and gall and kidneys, in old nuns and priests known to both of them. Introductions over, the mother-superior began to present the dossier on Sister Martin, the danger. She asked them to sit at the head of the table so that the thing would look judicial. She said reluctantly that she thought it had come to that.

‘Sister Martin is a brilliant young woman, university-trained. If I say that I’m alarmed at her cynicism about questions of Church administration and history, you’ll receive the wrong impression. She’s gentle and pleasant and, practically speaking, docile. What I’m trying to say is this – I don’t think that a Church history period should be an opportunity to describe how a medieval Pope was in such a hurry to go out hunting that he ordained some poor priest in a stable instead of a church. Nor to look into the lives of some of those Cardinals of pre-Reformation days.’

Costello chuckled. ‘The sins of the fathers …’

‘Yes, doctor. But you see, one of the girls’ parents
complained. Two excellent Catholics. The mother is a member of the Catholic Women’s Guild committee, the father is an executive of the Knights of Saint Patrick …’

Maitland blinked. He said, ‘Excuse me, mother. Not that it matters, but is the name of these people Boyle?’

The nun frowned as if an effort of memory were involved. ‘No … no. Not Boyle, father.’

His sigh was too audible. He settled back to suffer the dull malaise that the brown light, the buffed pearliness of the oak table, the terrifying cleanliness-next-to-Godliness of the cedar floorboards, awoke in him. (The cobbler allergic to leather, the claustrophobic miner, were not more star-crossed than Maitland.) Beyond the window, girls yelped on the tennis courts; the resonance of nylon rackets came to him; and in some music room a child with a violin assaulted the jolly scarps of ‘Humoresque’. None of it failed to add layers to his discomfort.

‘They were very reluctant to complain,’ said the mother-superior of the exemplary parents. ‘They claim, however, that Sister Martin has criticized the traditional formulas of belief. Not violently. Firmly. I must make that clear to you. There is no arrogance in Sister Martin. Absolutely none.’

‘Have you questioned her about these matters?’ Costello asked.

‘Yes, doctor. That is how I know – not violent, but firm. She uses terms for almighty God which, it seems, were coined by Protestant theologians. She speaks of “the ground of our being”, although she has reservations about that term, as about all other terms.’

Costello’s eyes narrowed.

The nun said with a hint of pride, ‘I thought of letting old Father Royal speak to her, but the trouble is she’d run rings around him. Shall I fetch her now? Oh, her views on the sacraments are a little revolutionary.’
Her eyes dropped. She had the grace not to like what her conscience demanded, not to like giving up her sister to theologians.

‘Before you go, mother. Did the parents complain on all these points?’

‘No. Actually their sense of outrage centred mainly in that she’d called perpetual novenas magic.’

‘Did you ask her about that point, mother?’ Monsignor Fleming said.

‘Yes, Monsignor. She said that – well, that for her, magic wasn’t necessarily a nasty word, that mankind deprived of magic wouldn’t be the richer.’

‘You seem to be careful not to misquote her,’ Costello decided.

‘Yes, I took notes of our interview and allowed her to reread and amend them. However, I am no expert, so I didn’t think it quite just to burden you with them.’

‘You
have
been merciful, mother.’

‘She’s a lovely girl …’

‘Sister Martin?’

‘Yes, doctor.’

Costello closed his eyes and made a harsh male sound with his sinuses. ‘There are questions, mother, on which we cannot yield an inch even to those we love.’ Maitland noticed for the first time that Costello had actually been taking notes of his own.

‘I had better let her speak for herself,’ the reverend mother decided.

Waiting for Sister Martin, Costello and the monsignor sat up straight and ready, knowing that theology was a man’s world and that here were men enough for the job. Maitland wished on the poor girl the guts of Joan of Arc, the wit of Héloise.

Costello told him, ‘James, we may not be able to observe all the amenities with this young lady.’

‘Why not?’ Maitland was preparing to say. ‘She sounds civilized enough.’

But then she came in; and in an attempt not to look judicial he took to playing with the cuff of his coat. It was impossible, though, massed at one end of a long table with an august theologian and a monsignor in purple stock, not to seem to be what he was. Which was, of all things, a judge.

She was young, with pale, fine-grained skin that reminded him of Grete’s. She said, ‘Good afternoon, monsignor, fathers,’ and waited like a schoolgirl to be invited to sit. Maitland blushed but lacked the courage; and in the end Costello glanced up and ordered her to take a seat. It was rudeness justified by the need for orthodoxy. Maitland became so angry at it that all he could do was sit on the rim of his chair and swallow. He thought, ‘One day, when you’re a bishop, you’ll be all worldly grace to the baggy wives of Q.C.’s.’

As it was, the expanse of table between the three priests and Sister Martin too clearly imposed the status of culprit on the woman. The monsignor unexpectedly found it alien to his nature that it should be so, that the girl should be kept at such an inquisitorial distance. He pointed to the gas fire glinting inappositely under an antique mantelpiece.

‘Bring your seat up where we can talk, sister.’

The chair being massive, Maitland helped her shift it. ‘Here?’ he asked, grounding it. ‘Thank you, father,’ she said. ‘Father’ came out broken in two by a nervous lack of breath at the back of the throat. Maitland felt his profound lack of innocence. He was glad to return to Costello’s side.

‘What’s all this then, sister?’ Costello wanted to know. He smiled leniently, the sort of male leniency that provokes feminists. His fingers played sensitively with
the edges of his notepaper. ‘Been scandalizing the parents?’

‘It is possible for these things to be reported out of context by children,’ said the nun. ‘I believe I may have been reported a little out of context, father.’

‘Of course,’ the old monsignor said pacifically. ‘It happens.’

Costello raised his voice. ‘Just the same, aren’t some of the things you’ve said rather rash whether in or out of context?’

The nun told them, ‘When a class hasn’t been fully prepared, it’s unavoidable that something rash will be said.’

‘And you don’t prepare your classes fully?’ Costello asked her in a voice that only just managed to maintain basic human trust in her.

‘We’re very understaffed. It’s impossible to prepare every class fully at the moment, father.’

As a first principle to which he required her assent, Costello stated, ‘The teaching of the one true faith comes first, sister.’

Seeing that she was not meant to win, ‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Let us begin at the beginning,’ the doctor suggested. ‘I have always thought that God was God, sister, that we confuse the faithful by calling him by any tautological terms such as “The ground of our being”, and that other meaningless and downright blasphemous title, “the God beyond God”.’

Tautological terms such as ‘Our father who art in heaven’, Maitland thought. He began to wonder if he also were not the object of the inquiry – two anarchists for the price of one.

‘Don’t you agree, sister?’ Costello persisted.

‘When one spends all one’s energies pursuing the
vision of God, one is disturbed when people find it possible to say that God is dead.’

‘That God-is-dead business is just a university fashion.’

‘Partly, father, yes, but fashion is an extension of society. So that one is still alarmed.’

The nun, her skin smooth with those cosmetics which Mother Church considered best for her – these being humility in argument, the seeing of God’s will in the decrees of people such as Costello, modesty about the eyes – nevertheless managed her small ironies. Mainly by speaking to the tribunal as a whole, trusting to its joint good reason, using ‘father’ in a collective sense. There was a marginal hint about her manner: that she did not trust entirely to Costello’s good reason, that she did not consider him unqualifiedly as her father. This was so tenuous an implication that Costello would lose dignity by responding to it. Yet, while tenuous, it was also unmistakable. Maitland felt pleased with this nun. She underlined one of the few things he knew about women: that they were essentially ungovernable.

He himself broke in. ‘What do you think people mean when they say that God is dead, sister?’

‘I hardly dare say,’ she answered immediately, but gave signs of being about to show considerable daring. ‘But human organizations limit God by identifying themselves with him. They express him in terms that accord with their nature and needs. Then the terms get old – like the organizations. The terms die.’ She glanced at Costello. ‘If I used the term “God beyond God”, which I can’t really remember doing – but we’re very busy – if I used it, it was to make the girls realize that no matter how old terms and organizations grow, the real God is still untouched and unknowable and speaks in silences.’

Quickly she sat back, alarmed to discover herself
eloquent before priests. She had, in fact, given the word ‘unknowable’ a ring of triumph, of passion and blood. This helped bring all that was most arid to the forefront of Costello’s mind.

‘You say “unknowable”, sister,’ he observed. ‘What do you mean by unknowable?’

She tried to say, grimacing. ‘Words are a trap, father. Yet I suppose it is what you theologians would call unknowable in his essence.’

That particular theologian became taut with delight.

‘The first Vatican council rejected your opinion as heretical.’

‘Did they, father? It’s so hard to express oneself, but then if one is a teacher one has to try. However, I’m sure we both ultimately agree, Vatican One and myself. So many of these theological squabbles are only matters of semantics.’

‘Are they, just?’ said Costello.

‘I was reading last week –’ the girl began, and then, ‘Did you want me to continue speaking, father?’

‘Why not? You’re the informed member of the panel.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry. I realize how annoying it must be for a professional theologian to have to listen to me.’

‘At the moment you must speak. That is why we are here.’

The monsignor smiled and assured her. ‘We’re fair game.’

For a second a small girl ran beneath the window taunting, ‘Boarders are getting cabbage for tea.’ The nun took her crucifix out of one place in her girdle and stabbed it back into another. Her flummoxed hands found this the first thing available for the doing.

‘I was merely going to say that I read an article last
week in an English review about Luther and Aquinas, that Luther meant by faith what Aquinas meant by hope, that Luther needn’t have been excommunicated, and all that religious and political agony could have been prevented. The predicament we are in with words, you see. Now, when one speaks of God, one has to apologize for the poverty of words, one has to mistrust them. Yet we have to speak about the unspeakable, don’t we?’

‘Of course,’ old Monsignor Fleming said, as if for the sake of keeping well in the game. ‘But a teacher of the young has to be so careful, sister, so very careful …’

In the meantime, Maitland, though not expert on legislation, decrees and anathemas, saw reason to suggest, ‘If I might correct an impression sister may have taken from what you said a moment ago, Doctor Costello … I don’t think that either yourself or the Vatican council intend to imply that Sister Martin is a heretic because she believes God is, as she says, untouched and ultimately unknowable.’

Costello sighed. ‘Let me assure you, Dr Maitland, that that
is
what the Vatican council condemned.’

‘Of course, the relationship between man and God is personal and can’t be legislated for,’ said Maitland. ‘All the council claims is that God can be known by reason. But surely not in his essence – whatever that word means.’