‘Say good night to the kind gentleman,’ Celia told Nora, and Maitland saw that Egan had been largely right in predicting the woman’s drift as the point of ‘kind gentleman’ was aimed at him alone. On the other hand, he began to wonder whether Egan might not just as well have delivered the girl when, a second later, drawing in her breath to let Nora go inside, Celia hissed, ‘You’ve wet yourself, you fool!’
Then Maitland and the sister stood in silence listening to Nora plod around the interior of the house, sobbing so peculiarly that when she went into the bathroom they could tell by the tiled echo. Hearing the bathroom door close, they were both immediately ready to speak.
‘I felt so sorry for her,’ Maitland said, and not for effect.
‘Are you a friend of Dr Maurice Egan?’
‘That’s the fellow who’s on the Couraigne prize committee?’
Celia flourished the book in her hands. The gesture said, ‘Look, save your prevarications. I’ve studied you people in fact and in literature, and I can tell a prevarication from some distance.’ The book was one of those that feature, as well as a dust jacket, an extra ration of promises printed on a belt of white paper. Maitland, who habitually stared at books, got a glimpse of the words, ‘Classic story of the emotional exploitation of a young girl …’
‘He’s a priest,’ she said. ‘He’s a bumptious little priest.’
She put such classic hatred into her plosives that Maitland hung his head.
‘I know him,’ he conceded. ‘I thought he might have been bumptious when I first met him. In fact, he’s very unsure and much humbler than most,’
Celia came out with a remarkably whole-hearted laugh. ‘Where did you find Nora then?’ she asked, willing to extend to Maitland’s story the same suspicion she applied to his claim about Egan’s humility.
Maitland told her none the less. For embroidery he said, ‘The taxi-driver got very angry about it. He wanted us to clean up.’
‘I don’t blame him,’ she decided, while patently disbelieving in both cab and driver. ‘How much do we owe you in fares?’
‘You don’t owe me anything. I was very pleased. Listen, pardon me for saying so, but I think she should be allowed to sleep and then see a doctor. She seemed beyond herself with …’ But he didn’t know what. ‘Some sort of unhappiness,’ he temporized.
‘Now, that is perception! Don’t think I won’t consider your advice, Mr James. You see, I do have some concern for her.’
‘I’m sure you do. I’ll have to go. It’s so late.’
She laughed and stared up and down his length, her eyes fixing on his black trousers.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, still staring. ‘No doubt you have to rise early to say Mass, father.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘By their black trousers you shall know them. Anyhow, I heard you preach a few weeks ago. It was very pleasant. It shed no light, but at least it didn’t bore. Speaking of boredom, have you ever heard a sermon from Father Egan? No. They should make you listen to each other. That would be only fair.’
‘I don’t think we’ll gain by –’
‘No, you wouldn’t. You fellows never do think anything will be gained by any argument where you hold the thorny end of the stick.’
‘What’s the use? You have me red-handed.’
‘Do I, indeed?’ She felt a mole on the left cheek of her ravaged-looking face. ‘What’s your name, father?’
‘James.’
‘James? That wasn’t the name … Oh, I see. We’re on to Christian names, are we? Call me Celia, James.’
‘I would. But I have to go.’
Celia smoothed down the soft floral gown as if it were a uniform. ‘Oh yes, you’re all so busy. It took the church courts a mere four and a half years to decide that Nora’s husband was impotent as a paling fence. The pace must be deadly.’
‘I know very little about church courts, Celia. I’m not a canon lawyer. But I know they’re slow. I suppose all courts are slow.’
‘Nearly five years to discover that a man is impotent! It must be a record. Of a kind.’
‘I suspect that you wouldn’t find it was a record. The Church is accustomed to take its time. We boast about that. But it has its bad aspects, I know.’
‘Indeed. It gives a girl, Nora, time to develop a taste for the judge.’
Knowing that he was playing the game Celia’s way, Maitland could still not prevent himself from saying, ‘Judge?’
‘In the second case. No, he wasn’t judge. He was usher of the black rod or defender of the seal or something. Egan.’
‘He’s defender of the bond.’
‘That’s it. Now, isn’t that a title? Straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.’
‘Let me assure you, Celia. Egan had nothing to do with Nora’s state tonight.’
‘I know what you mean. He wouldn’t have the gumption to liquor her up. He wouldn’t have the gumption to sleep with her and go on being a sacrilegious priest. Damn it, it’s happened to better men than he is. Virtue through lack of initiative, that’s Chubby Egan for you. As if he would ever be likely to do any good to anyone, sacrilegiously or otherwise.’
Maitland said, ‘He has to be of use to himself first of all. But you know that.’
Boyishness had died in him by now; this vigilant and bitter woman had given it its final discharge. He was beginning to take glances over his shoulder, niggled by the awareness of Egan’s disquiet assailing him from a distance of a hundred yards or more and through a series of hedgerows. Then Nora’s hollow voice could be heard, calling, ‘Celie, Celie!’
‘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.
10
THROUGHOUT 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.’