Three Cheers For The Paraclete (22 page)

O
NE MIDDAY
,
AT
the dinner-table, Egan handed Maitland a note. It said, ‘Don’t you
dare
try to escape via a lavatory after this meal. As you can imagine, I must see you. I shall wait in
my
room as I prefer the uncluttered surroundings. I anticipate you will not be such a coward as to avoid this interview.’

It was the sort of note that comes to Holmes in Baker Street during mist, fog or downpour, and James looked up smiling. He saw that Egan merely sat taking savage mouthfuls of soup, swallowing it in retaliation. Soon the entire staff would begin to notice clefts in the man whose face and body looked like a fair attempt at a formula for sanity but who left the table after half a plateful of vegetable soup.

Maitland, too, left before dessert. He might have time to deal with Egan and still catch the quarter-to-two boat. Over the House of Studies the sky was closing in, all the windows full of Irish saints and Christian symbols had lost their radiance and gone the gross colours of boiled lollies. On the stairs where he and Egan had toted Nora, the gloom was still thick enough for any escapade.

Striding his room from desk to window, Egan had become out of tune with the rational pastel walls and curtains genial as chance acquaintance. He said,
immediately Maitland entered, ‘If I didn’t mention that that business about the letter was confidential, Dr Maitland, it was only because I thought you might realize that much for yourself.’

‘Of course,’ said Maitland.

‘Oh? Did you have a late growth of conscience then? People such as Monsignor Nolan will be gratified to know.’

‘I don’t understand you, Maurice.’

‘His Grace has asked me to go into retreat for ten days at some friary – to give sober consideration to the requests I made of His Holiness.’

‘My God.’

Egan stood as still as a priest arrived at the turning-point of a rite. He said fervently, ‘I only hope it was a matter of conscience with you, James, and not simply malice …’

‘You mean you consider that –’

Egan latched both his fists onto the desk, and bellowed, ‘Don’t temporize! I am willing to believe that it
was
a matter of conscience with you, because your conscience was outraged from the start by the very thought. If you’re not malicious, you’re a … bloody fool. But Nolan has suspected that much from the start. No mean judge of men, Nolan.’

‘I told nobody,’ Maitland said.

‘Who then? The Holy Father? My friend wouldn’t have had time to see him as yet. Perhaps Nora did.’

‘Perhaps,’ Maitland assented.

Egan went, making noises of disgust, to the curtains and peered illusively at the grey face of the chapel. ‘Just allow me to say,’ he begged in a wafer of a voice, ‘before you go, that with full composure and deliberate malice – you see, I don’t fear to announce these things aloud – I intend to give them
your
secret. I want you to know what
it is to have to explain the unexplainable to people such as His Grace.’

This is what it is to be between Gods, thought Maitland, between the defined, tabbed and codified God of corporations and the indefinable, untabbed, uncodified God of Sister Martin. You lose friends and don’t care, you lose secrets without fearing the loss, and are accused without its interesting you. Because accusation cannot make you feel any more estranged than you already are.

‘I didn’t tell anyone,’ he said for the sake of form, because Egan was expending so much on the interview that it would have been unfair not to show some vigour. ‘If you want to tell Nolan or His Grace anything I told you in confidence, feel free. But I can’t imagine you behaving out of character to that extent.’

‘Wait and see!’

‘Secondly, you should consider the possibility of Nora’s being the culprit.’

‘When I was about fifteen I found half the senior football team smoking in the dressing-sheds. I was appalled to find the flower of the physical side of the school puffing weed. But worse still, the captain glowered at me and yelled, “Crap off!” I am indebted to that forgotten hero for enriching my grasp of the language, because I can’t put it better than “Crap off, Maitland!” And have your explanations ready for His Grace.’

All the way downhill Maitland could see the moored ferry at the pier and was engrossed in catching it. Going on short sprints and pulling up broken-gaitedly whenever his breath gave, he wondered how a man could be damned or saved in any traditional sense when, on a given afternoon, the catching of the quarter-to-two ferry could seem the ultimate, while a book of notes could omit a radiance like a divine person.

He missed the ferry, none the less.

Now he was sobered by the poor alternatives the half-hour wait offered him. He could buy an American malted from a sad Greek or stroll along the wintering fun parlours or see sluggish monsters in the aquarium. None of this emitted a radiance like a divine person. He had time now and space in which to see the danger.
They
would force him out of that great scandalous body, that infamous but mystical corporation they called the Church. And, convinced on the infamy, unaware of the mystery, he would find it easy to oblige and go. The question was whether a man was justified in leaving because he didn’t care. Was that an adequate or human motive? To go on the basis of a vacancy – because he didn’t care and Costello and Nolan did? If ever he proceeded to take a wife and teach in good Protestant schools, it would need to be by his own decision, not by command of those two odious Brahmins.

He found a telephone. It was answered by some student.

‘Yes, doctor. He’s in the president’s office.’

‘Tell him I said he
must
come to the phone on the instant. Please.
Must.
An emergency.’

There was a silence of some minutes before anyone came again.

‘James. Dr Costello here. The president would like you to come home. Immediately.’

‘Home? What do you mean,
home
?’

‘
Home
! Unless you have to dine with your publishers.’

‘No. But I’ll be home towards nine.’

‘Now, James, that’s hardly immediately. This is of massive importance –’

‘I know. You want to make me Dean of Studies. But I’ll be
home
, as you so fetchingly call it, at nine. Also, go gently with Egan.’

He said good-bye and hung up. In fact he wanted
vengeance, was tempted to jab at the stanchions that held the pier together.

He came back with lovers and the crapulous in the half-past-eight boat.

Egan could be seen straying up and down the cold pier, like an Angus Wilson clergyman with an eye out for little boys. When he saw Maitland he started to weep.

‘You must forgive me,’ he gurgled.

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Maitland said, a little too reminiscently of some big-hearted American hero taking his joys and betrayals with half a pint of bourbon.

Egan pressed into his hands a blue airmail letter. With the contrariness of such things, it presented its finish first. Maitland saw, ‘Your brother in Christ the King, Henry.’

‘Please read it.’

‘My dear Maurie,’ it began, as if a diminutive could soothe, ‘I find it hard to believe that you fully intended the commission you have given me to do and which – I’m sure you’ll be willing to believe – I will perform at any personal cost if that is what you want. Just the same, I’m sure that if I tried to negotiate the difficult business which you have decided on, I’d be very glad of a chance to reconsider the course I was taking. I feel that the one to help you reconsider, Maurie, is your own archbishop …’

‘As this man himself would say,’ Maitland muttered, ‘that’s rich.’

‘… I feel that questions of confidence don’t enter into the relationship between a priest and his bishop, and I hear that yours is a very enlightened man, so that he’d be aware of what high-quality product one Maurie Egan is. I am writing him by the same mail as I am sending this …’

‘A good old chancellery fascist, this boy!’ said Maitland.

‘… and will be willing to perform anything that you and he work out in concert. Rest assured, Maurice, I shall remember you at the altar of sacrifice each morning …’

‘I’ve ruined you for nothing.’

‘No one ruins what isn’t.’ He found it hard to be disturbed that the crisis had come.

‘I was mad, James.’ That being preferable to a fall from grace. ‘I was mad. A good friend, a good friend …’

Maitland forced him into the back seat of his little coupé and drove him back to the House of Studies. Later in the evening Nolan called in a discreet Catholic doctor to inject sedative into Egan. To Almighty God via the almighty knock-out drop, thought Maitland, although he was glad to see his friend sink to sleep, and only the super-righteous presence of Nolan and Costello moved him to irony.

Later, Costello cornered him. ‘The president and I, we’ve been reviewing the time you’ve spent here. We find it hard to believe that you want to remain a priest.’

Maitland was shaken. He said, ‘It’s essential that I stay.’

‘Essential? You mean, for your salvation?’

Maitland agreed. ‘Yes, for that.’

Costello sighed. ‘With your record, James, and taking that book into consideration … it becomes impossible for anyone to tell whether what you say is merely an exercise in sarcasm.’

N
ORA
,
WHO COYLY
remembered her drunkenness of some months back, fluttered, but insisted that Maitland come in.

‘Maurice asked me to visit you,’ he explained, and his eyes wavered towards the bay-windowed prow of the living-room on his left. ‘Is your sister in?’

‘She is.’ But Nora foresaw no difficulty on that count. ‘Please come in, father. We’ve just made tea.’

He followed her inside; where she kept remembering in a quavering way to perform little politenesses, such as to take his hat and point the way. He sensed, not altogether trusting the sense, that she was rushing him indoors; and found it beyond him to cut into her vein of ditheriness and force a conference in the hall. Full of complex dismay, they shuffled in the doorway of the living-room, both yielding the way, both beginning to move but yielding again. Within sat Celia, possessed by an acrid calm. She glanced over her shoulder at Maitland’s entry and sat forward almost politely, her raised left hand begging silence. Beside her, a race broadcast gurgled towards its upshot.

‘Sit here, father,’ Nora whispered. She was suddenly more expansive; even her shoulders were not as hunched.

Maitland sat in what was obviously her chair, at the
sunny end of the room near Celia. Now the horses were into the straight, and Celia swallowed. Living for the culmination, dressed in a long floral frock that made her seem proportionate or, better still, lovely, she woke large and cordial sensualities in Maitland’s belly. But the habit of celibacy asserted itself.
He who rides a tiger
, he thought …

By which time the winners had been semaphored. Celia’s indolent hand turned the volume merely down, being satisfied when the ranting voice sounded like people arguing four or five gardens away.

Immediately Maitland told them that Egan had gone to hospital. They heard him soberly. There was no yell of jubilee from Celia, no breast-beating from Nora, who looked unfathomably from Celia to Maitland to Celia again.

Celia asked what the trouble was with Egan, and found a Dresden china teacup for Maitland while he told her of Egan’s nervous collapse. An acute anxiety state, he admitted.

Nothing was said as tea was handed round; though Maitland could hear some harsh breathing from Nora. Yet, through silences that begged to be broken with tears, she did not weep. Rather, eyes down, Maitland began to feel that he was being stared at and, glancing at last, saw the two sisters, far from engrossed in him, totally distracted from him. Out of inert faces they peered at each other; raw, level, irrefragable communion. He wondered how Maurice Egan, with or without the Pope’s consent, would have dealt with this sister-hood deep as the womb.

‘What hospital?’ asked Nora, putting down her cup and straying towards the windows.

Maitland told her. ‘He said he will write fully when he’s able. They have him drugged almost continuously.’

‘Poor, poor Maurice.’ Her voice gave. ‘Can he tell people apart?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s like a perpetual state of drunkenness, that’s all.’

Though he bit his clumsy lip, neither woman saw need to impute spite to him.

‘We must go and see him as soon as possible, Celia. Are you using the car tomorrow?’

Maitland tried to say, ‘There’s no chance –’

‘If you’d like the outing yourself,’ Nora suggested, ‘you could drive me up there.’

‘I might, too. It’s superb country. On a clear day you can get a view right to the sea.’

Nora held her hands out for the afternoon sun to rinse. Saying ‘Poor, poor Maurice’ more resolutely this time. She stared at the moored yachts across the street, and the pottering yachtsmen.

‘We could take a picnic lunch,’ Celia proposed.

‘He’s probably not up to eating much. But we could take that chicken, in case. And then there are the giblets.’

‘Giblet broth.’

‘I was thinking the same thing. We might –’

Maitland, close to panic-stricken, made a clatter with his cup, a brutal noise for Dresden. Picnic plans withered in the stem.

He said. ‘Nora, you can’t see him.’

With perhaps a sneer, Celia murmured, ‘My goodness, he
must
be ill …’

Maitland persisted. ‘It isn’t that he’s too ill. Nora, I wonder could I speak to you in private?’

The woman had gone sallow, but she said with a ferocity akin to Celia’s, ‘I want my sister to be here.’

‘Sit down, Nora,’ Celia prescribed and was obeyed.

She made a good convenor. She said, ‘It seems you have something to tell us, father.’

Just as he felt certain that these two women were sufficient to each other, he felt certain now that Nora would weep affectingly, temperately. In view of what he had to tell her, he hoped that these hastily founded certainties were valid. And it was not only the talk of giblet broth, nor their relish at the thought of nurse-maiding the broken priest that gave him hope. Rather that Nora had not convinced him, when he had come in a state that could largely be called
willing to be convinced
. His instincts hinted that, having suffered, she had become inured to living off the stored fat of her agonies, was growing, like her sister, into a professional wronged-woman.

‘He wanted me to let you know,’ Maitland began, ‘that he can’t see you again, not even once. He’ll write, as I said, but he isn’t capable of writing or telephoning yet, and the message couldn’t wait.’

Nora wept affectingly, temperately, yet credibly enough to alarm Maitland.

He thought, ‘So much for certainties! This may be the real McCoy, eternal widowhood for Nora Tully.’ Yet he could not manage to believe it.

Celia could. She had risen, and stood chafing Nora’s shoulders. Since to go on lolling and to intervene both seemed improper, Maitland sat tight, waiting to give details. But Celia began first. The tragedy, or whatever it was, had at least muted her.

‘He decides when to terminate the affair, eh? When
he
feels the bite? Ask him what about the girl he’s kept bloody enthralled for two years.’

‘Well, it wasn’t his own decision.’

‘I suppose his spiritual director told him. Lop off the limb of Satan! She won’t feel it. It’ll only damn-well kill her, that’s all. Spiritual directors! Illiterate disrespecters of human decency –’

‘His archbishop told him to cut the connection.’

‘His archbishop?’

‘
The
archbishop. It was a command.’ He tried to speak directly to Nora. ‘He could never have given the system up. It would have killed him to do it. He would have been no use to you as an apostate, or whatever they call them.’

‘I suppose you think God is honoured by all this?’ said Celia.

‘I don’t know. I’m the type who could leave tomorrow without my old vows poisoning me, turning to gangrene, if you like. But Maurice isn’t.’

‘Well, Nora doesn’t happen to be interested in you.’

‘I know. It wasn’t a proposal.’

Nora asked, her small voice caught in clenched fists, ‘The Pope didn’t grant him his petition?’

‘Some minor official returned the letter to His Grace. It was an impossible plan, Nora. If Maurice hadn’t been so wrought-up he would have seen how impossible it was.’

‘She’s just the type to take a lot of notice of archbishops,’ Celia judged of her sister.

‘So is Maurice,’ Maitland told her.

‘Oh, damn Maurice. Celibacy is only a high form of sex-titillation. An attack on women from a more exalted level. You read the psychologists!’ she recommended.

‘I don’t think Maurice is getting much fun out of it, Miss Tully.’

‘
Mrs
Crosley, however abandoned.’ She bent and made soothing noises close to Nora’s ear. Egan’s dark girl, bereaved by a prelate, laid her head on the arm of her lounge chair and locked it down with her slim tragic fingers. Bolstered by such grief, Celia glowered at the priest.

‘It must be convenient to be attached to God via an
archbishop. You play about with a girl until the human toll begins to mount. Then you let your archbishop know that you have been ensnared by some unscrupulous woman. He commands, “Cut the connection!” You tell the girl, “I’m sorry, but I’m bound in conscience. It’s the will of God and I’ll always pray for you, etc.” Isn’t that the perfect male fiddle? No male with the normal endowment of brains in his backside could think of a better one.’

Maitland sighed. ‘If you’re trying to tell me that churchmen are dishonest, I know that already. The question is smaller – Maurice and Nora. They believe in archbishops, they believe in canon law. There’s no hope for them.’

He saw that the quivering Nora was listening. He whispered to Celia, ‘Arguments about the turpitude of churchmen and Church won’t have any bearing. You must help her –’

‘Oh, Christ!’ roared Celia, and pranced away into the window area. Maitland blushed for sounding like a stage parson, and swallowed as she swept back down on him, strutting, her glorious breasts bobbing visibly. ‘Will you perhaps send me roneo’d notes on how to do it? Arrogance in the best traditions of Holy Mother Church! Maitland’s balm for the sin-sick soul!’

Solitary now, Nora mourned and skirted some of the milder borders of hysteria. Maitland felt bound to stay until the girl had been calmed; yet calm might take as long as a birth or a death. He was pleased to see that Celia was intent now on making it quick.

‘Come over here with me and sit in the sun.’

Helped to hobble to the window-seat, Nora indomitably rasped, ‘You don’t want to miss Regal Fred’s race.’

‘No. No. We’ll listen together. We won’t miss it. No. Some more tea?’

They seemed again to have forgotten Maitland. Celia stroked Nora’s dark hair for some minutes and held her watch up to the light once. It must have been some time after four. The bay was going slowly molten, and the windscreens of a luxury launch blazed miraculously. At length she turned to him, her hair and shoulders glowing in the prismatic light of advanced afternoon.

Completely lacking in ardour: ‘You can get out,’ she told Maitland.