Three Cheers For The Paraclete (20 page)

Slapping his leg again, Maitland said, ‘I know, I know.’ If only people would take their motives as read.
But neither Egan nor Hurst nor Joe Quinlan would. The malice of betrayal might essentially be that it prevented two men from taking an easy cup of coffee with each other. ‘Joe, you didn’t do me any harm. All I wish is that
they
let you enjoy the spoils in peace.’

‘The spoils?’ Joe asked.

‘The – house.’

‘Oh yeah.’

And it was immediately appalling how such a small and comic-opera betrayal could become freighted with such terror of loss as now made Joe Quinlan’s eyes seem to bulge.

‘It’s built on a downhill plot, there’s a garage underneath and a spiral staircase going up to the front patio. There’s french winders from the lounge-room onto the patio …’

Maitland nodded. French windows, which are glass and wood to those who can manage to afford them, can be a formula of salvation, a certificate of ownership of the winter sun, to those who have lived all their lives in plaster-board.

‘No chance of buying it?’

‘You’d need to be an accountant or somebody to own this one.’

Maitland almost explained that he didn’t have the money, but knew that that had not been Joe’s point. Then what is Joe’s point? he wondered.

Joe said, ‘They reckon they’re going to make us pay a big rent from next fortnight onwards. They want us to take some money and get out …’

‘But you don’t want to go back to the old places?’

Joe shrugged. ‘Morna bawls her eyes out,’ he explained.

Maitland looked away, his frightened eyes landing on the proprietor’s face by the cash register. The proprietor
smiled a smile that said, ‘Another cup?’ It was an unequal contest. Maitland gave in at once, nodded, held up two fingers.

He said, ‘Joe, I don’t think you’re telling me this for the sake of getting help from me.’

Joe perished the thought. ‘Oh, Christ no!’

‘Why are you telling me then?’

‘Well, I thought you’d be pretty crooked on me and that you’d like to know.’

‘How do you mean like to know.’

‘That the thing didn’t pay off for me. Like.’

So Joe Quinlan, in tatty sports-coat at a laminated table, made a medieval obeisance of the head. Before Maitland could say something worthy of the man, the Hungarian was beside them, insinuating two coffees, creamed and nutmegged, between them.

N
OW
E
GAN WAS
chatty as a fishwife, called at Maitland’s jumbled room at all hours, kept him from the public library and the utter luxury of taking notes for the novel. Maitland ended in all manner of stratagems to leave time free for this work. Behind the catalogue file in the House of Studies library there was a desk that could not be seen from the door, and Maitland would put his notes there before meals and hide there himself immediately after. But the severe spaces of the room were hostile to the private exhilarations of his imagination. Next he took to leaving his street clothes in the downstairs lavatory before lunch and changing into them immediately after, skipping to the ferry while the others were still giving thanks in the chapel. He still felt himself bound to stop work by seven and return across the bay to make his ear available to Egan.

One such night he found his friend already waiting for him, seated like a suspect in an alien gendarmerie, his hands on his knees, not prying into the significance of any of Maitland’s mess of notes.

‘She’s coming back,’ Maurice announced.

‘Back?’ asked Maitland and, suspecting that the ham sandwiches he had bought for their supper had somehow become superseded, dropped them on the table.

‘Back here. Back home, she says. She says she misses Celia and myself.’

‘It’s not kind of her to say that. To say that she misses
you
.’

‘I have never been very kind to her.’

His brow was focused, cross-eyed, on some ultimate intention.

The generations of men had found that the only cure for love of this nature was not to put a hemisphere between the lovers but to sink them in a blessed calyx of red-brick or oregon, on its own land close to bus and shops. Yet it seemed impossible that a
defensor vinculi
should come to the same conclusion.

Maitland could hardly help asking, ‘What will you do?’

Egan said, ‘I am used to confessing unlikely things to you, James. I also know how long these things take to pass through the normal channels. I intend therefore to write directly to the Supreme Pontiff, asking him, beseeching him as from the fires of hell, to save two souls by reducing me to the lay state and dispensing me from celibacy.’

The idea possessed magnitude even by Maitland’s standards, and reverence for it imposed a ten-second silence.

‘What do you think?’ Egan invited.

‘One of the functions of a public service is to prevent letters getting to the top man. The Church has its public service. How can a priest get a letter straight to the Pope without its having been screened by bureaucrats in Roman collars?’

Egan smiled. ‘I have a friend who is one of these bureaucrats in Roman collars. He’s an American and we studied together. He is a member of the Holy Office and he can arrange to be at some private audience and pass the letter directly to the Holy Father.’

Simultaneously, both men shook their heads, for the scheme induced its own vertigo. And on this same account Maitland refrained, for the time, from raising problems.

‘The thing to do,’ Egan said, ‘is to convince him that when I speak of two souls who will otherwise be lost, I mean it literally.’ He took his eyes from the Vatican, at which he had been gazing through the walls and around the curves of hemispheres. ‘I can tell you’re shocked, Maitland. But you yourself told me to take any attempts at coddling you as read.’

‘I’m
not
shocked,’ Maitland said, and went hunting in the sandwich bag to prove it. He had not had his evening meal. ‘I have to be honest. I don’t know whether it’s a good idea.’ He stared at the innards of the sandwich to make sure that the lady in the delicatessen had done the right thing by him.

‘It is
not
a good idea, no. It is the only idea I have left. No doubt you wonder how I will get on without the Mass.’

Maitland slammed the sandwich down on a study of seventeenth-century Spanish diplomacy.

‘For God’s sake, stop confusing me with some sort of vocation-poster priest. There are thousands of priests who could get by without their Mass, just as there are thousands of husbands who could get by without their wives.’

‘I’ll miss the active life of the priesthood.’

‘Of course you would. But if a person left a Chinese laundry after giving it twenty of his earthly years, he’d miss it.’

‘I myself have no doubts, James. It
is
a question of salvation.’

‘Are you sure it’s as basic as all that?’ asked Maitland, like a born counsellor, like a chancery sharp-shooter.

‘Do you think I use such terms lightly? Speak up, Maitland. What’s your objection?’

Maitland felt his beard, the long bristles around his Adam’s apple which his razor missed, often for a week at a time. ‘Firstly, if I had to forget that I was a priest, I could with ease do so. But
you
could never forget. The second thing is that perhaps when a person has suffered as Nora has – I only say
perhaps
– he or she gets used to abnormal situations, becomes addicted to them. All I would say is that you should make sure she would want you as a mere citizen, as a spouse.’

‘I
am
sure,’ the little man said slowly, and sat contemplatively for some time before losing his temper so thoroughly that he saw no false plea in asking, ‘What sort of priest do you think I am?’

Maitland said, ‘You must realize, Maurice, that this is a suggestion and not an accusation. In fact, the usual cowardly claptrap.’ To show his mundane faith and his lack of high-flown malice, he retrieved the sandwich and began to eat.

Egan, a man who had patience now only for accusations, bounced to his feet. ‘Sometimes you behave as if you deserved everyone’s hostility, James. You have no sense of fitness, no sense of time or place.’

By the skin of his teeth, Maitland managed to be mean enough to say, ‘This is my time and place, mate. I’ve had no lunch and no dinner.’

‘Don’t let me be the one to keep you from your bun-bag. Besides, I have a letter to write.’

Maitland intercepted the small angry man at the door.

‘Forgive me, Maurice. Eating sandwiches in front of you at a time like this.’ But the stupid thing was still in his hand, half-eaten. He went on, ‘There are considerations, human and otherwise … I suppose you’ve taken them all into account.’

The little priest shook his head, not as a negative, but to dismiss his own profitless anger.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘I was stupid enough to ask for advice I didn’t want. But if a young radical like yourself knows that there are considerations, James, all the more so an old stuffed-shirt like me.’ He smiled. ‘I exempt you from the obligation of cataloguing the things I have already taken into account. I thank you for your attention. And I do have a letter to write.’

He passed Maitland and emerged in the seedy faubourg of the hall, a stranger who had to take his bearings by one of the economy bulbs.

Maitland hissed at him from the ante-room, ‘Maurice, I must say it. It’s hard to see you succeeding.’

There was something of the vehemence of his scheme in the little priest’s voice as he said, ‘I refuse for the moment to consider the possibility of failure. Of sacrifice, obedience and mercy, I know which one is the most perfect. I cannot believe that a Supreme Pontiff does not also know.’ He rubbed his paws and gathered his shoulders like a man already seated at a desk writing what he wants to. He paused before telling Maitland valedictorily, ‘In any case, you are one of those people whom I feel I can never repay.’

On the appropriate morning, Maitland cornered Hurst after breakfast and told him that this was his day to return to the psychiatrist.

‘I don’t know whether I need it,’ Hurst said, though his eyes, pallid and moon-struck, were symptoms in themselves.

For once, Maitland went gently with him. ‘You’re feeling better?’

‘Much.’

‘Well. Nothing lost by going today. It’s only etiquette, you know. I’m afraid I must insist.’

‘Very well, doctor.’

‘And don’t be seen catching the ferry, eh? Oh, and please, if he writes a letter –’

‘Of course.’

‘I said earlier that I’d abandon you after your first visit.’

‘Yes. But it takes time to decide what has to be done.’

What had to be done, so far as Hurst had decided, was that he must confess the psychiatrist’s findings and deliver the psychiatrist’s letter to Costello, on whom the Spirit had breathed, and not to this inept outsider.

Meanwhile, Costello was as full of business as any bride with an outside chance of happiness. He kept tailors busy on his episcopal robes, goldsmiths busy on his pectoral cross and ring designed by himself. Often bishops inherited the insignia of deceased prelates; but that
was
a risk, to depend on the taste of a dead man. He booked his air passage to Rome for his
ad liminal
visit, could be seen in Asiatic pyjamas limping the passageway after inoculations, made after-dinner speeches, and lovingly prepared his autobiography for the secular and religious press.

Morning and night in the chapel, the prayers for a newly elected bishop were said; and Nolan spoke, prayed and effervesced about the coming consecration as fervently as an ugly bridesmaid who knows not only that she will never reach the altar on her own merits but that it has occurred to all the wedding-guests that she never will.

While Maitland was trying to corner Hurst a third time and considering telephoning the doctor, Costello brought home three tailor’s boxes full of modish pontificals – a cassock with cape and piping, a chimer, a
zucchetto
and biretta. The big man, clad in them before his mirror, would have been seen as touching and lovable if anyone had happened in. Though the robes seemed extremely new and incomplete without his overdue pectoral, he stood immobile in them for some minutes and murmured three times before disrobing, ‘For He that is mighty has done great things to me …’ So he hung them in the wardrobe and went down to dinner.

While he ate, the students’ dinner ended and Hurst came to the bishop-elect’s room to admit two visits to the psychiatrist. Hurst had noticed that Costello had not been at table at the beginning of the meal, but he had then been once more consumed in a spirit-to-spirit struggle with the bread-knife. That wedge of inimical black that was His fulfilled Lordship entering no more than nudged the outer edges of his vision. So now, believing Costello to be
in
, his frightened veins, freighted with blood-lust, jumped as he waited for an answer to his knock. He thought he heard the bishop ask him in, though it was only a window grating in the wind. When visibly exercising patience, His Lordship did sound like a window grating in the wind; and now paid the penalty. For Hurst, desperate though well-mannered, opened the door to see immediately the robes, empty but ineradicably suggestive of the princely bulk of Costello. At the same time he wondered whether Costello’s teak letter-knife, which he had often eyed during confessions, was on the desk.

The paper-knife served only for making triangular rents in the cassock, but his hands could do the rest of the work. Tittering through introverted lips like Charlie Chaplin’s, he sat on the purple biretta that lay on the bed. After that, confident that he could explain the prank away, he went upstairs and took enough tablets to
give him a good sleep short of the final one. He took, in all, four days’ supply of sedative.

Maitland himself found Costello stumbling as never under the influence of smallpox injections. The mouth was forced towards one corner of the face. He was hissing.

‘What is it?’ Maitland had to ask.

Costello tried first to gather the pace to brush past, but then stopped dead.

‘You
might
ask!’ In contravention of his years of sober deep-breathing, he champed a mouthful of air. ‘No, not even you could have done this.’

‘Are you sure, My Lord?’ Maitland asked boisterously.

The bishop leant against the wall. ‘Oh God!’ he said.

Maitland took hold of Costello’s elbow. ‘What is it?’

‘Just you come and see!’

Across Costello’s room lay his shredded robes. He said, ‘A hundred and seventy dollars’ worth,’ and punched the wall with his fist, and began to weep, neither for the money nor for the fist.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Costello. It’s barbarous,’ Maitland told him, and saw the paper-knife lying near the wardrobe.

‘Who in the name of heaven did this poisonous thing?’ Costello called to him.

‘No one who merely dislikes you.’ He struggled uselessly with the temptation to suggest, ‘Someone with disappointed hopes –’

‘Don’t be insane. If you think Monsignor Nolan would –’

‘Of course not. I wasn’t naming names.’

Costello found the chair by his prie-dieu. ‘It’s so disgusting,’ he said, and stared at his cassock with as much horror as if blowflies had been drinking at its wounds. He seemed nauseated, and his large hands just managed to control themselves.

But where was Hurst and what was Hurst doing?

As a pretext, Maitland said, ‘I’ll go and get you something for the way you feel.’

Upstairs, on a floor where he had lived as a student, a bunch of young clerics stood finding nought for their comfort beneath a dim bulb. The remembered dinginess struck him, even in his present hurry, with an odious nostalgia. He asked them where Hurst’s room was and left them with such urgency when they’d told him that their eyes followed him and then, off-handedly, as if going to their rooms, they followed too.

Hurst was asleep and his person innocent of blood. After trying to rouse him, Maitland could not resist taking the boy’s slack jaw in his hand and shutting and opening it fluidly, like the jaw of a sambo money-box. Even in those muscles that traditionally resisted and gave the alarm, Hurst slept. Without pain and dreary interviews with Nolan, he had eased himself out of the priestly life.

The pulse, Maitland found, was low but strong.

‘You’ve managed it,’ he told the utterly reposeful form. ‘You’re out of limbo.’ A bungalow and seven mortal and miserable thousand a year for Hurst; and offspring, smelling of wet, milk and talc, in his arms. So Maitland hoped.