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:
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face.
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.’
‘Should he have?’
The managing director blinked. To Maitland he seemed distractingly honest, a man much put upon by the dodges of men-in-the-field. He said to the accountant, ‘We’ll soon see. Have someone bring us our copy of the particular contract.’ He quoted a code from the document Maitland had dropped on the desk. ‘It will have the salesman’s name …’
Maitland managed the dourness to say, ‘Wait on. I don’t want to see a salesman crucified.’
‘Now, father, melodrama …!’ the accountant told him.
‘If he didn’t tell my cousin about the mortgage, it’s because he has permission or perhaps even orders not to do so.’
‘And if you weren’t a priest, I’d have you shown out of the building.’
‘And if my priesthood has that much weight, I want my cousin released from his contract. I want you to give him his money back.’
‘Investment General own the land now.’
‘Surely the hand can speak to the glove.’
‘It’s not so simple. Our contract is a legal one, theirs is a legal one. Why did your cousin sign them if he had doubts?’
‘Perhaps it’s just possible that marble and glass and aluminium and chrome – the works, in fact – and an acute air of professionalism can all hypnotize a man. I don’t suppose you think so, though.’
‘I confess I don’t.’
The telephone burred, a soft and insidiously clean sound putting doubt on Maitland’s crusade. The managing director excused himself and attended to it, moaning trade talk down it, frowning pitifully all the time. Some realtor’s zealot could be heard barking back at him. He muffled it with a gentle hand.
‘I trust you’ll see the matter more clearly by Sunday, father. I’m very busy …’
‘Good morning,’ said Maitland, gratefully as a class released for a half-day, glad to have argued dutifully.
Now he felt intimidated by the outer office, and bolted down the fire-stairs, savouring their loneliness; burstin
g too athletically into an arcade of thrice-mortgaged coffee and lingerie shops and out among the sunlit mortgagees upon the pavements.
It was an expensive parish, but he couldn’t help that. He was aware of faces pointed at him, seeming bland and coddled, or perhaps bracing themselves for another bland and coddling sermon. Their church was Spanish Mission in conception, but all the asperities of Spanish Mission had been softened with rare blonde brick. Costly-looking couples, risen from late beds, dashed in through the porch and found seats while he gathered his notes. He assured himself that they wouldn’t care, that Joe was an anachronism here. The proletariat, like vaudeville, was vanishing.
‘The Church is criticized,’ he began, ‘for its neglect of social evils. And certainly we sometimes condemn an individual evil while we condone the social evil that bred it.’ Sometimes? It had rarely been otherwise. But one had to be careful with well-heeled congregations: they were always clericalist when it came to a pinch. ‘We condemn individual corruption but are not actively appalled by corruption on an international scale. We condemn family-planning but say little of the economic evils which make so many believe it so necessary.’
And thus onto those evil sisters, Allied Projects and Investment General; though of course he did not name them.
‘In this country,’ he called, shaking his manipled left hand in bafflement. ‘In this country!’
He remembered Ezra Pound:
‘Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern …
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
Between the young bride and her bride-groom …’
The orator’s easy exaltation shook him; he was, for half a minute, drunk on the utter fitness of what he and Pound wanted to say, on the utter bane of Allied Projects and Investment General, all their thralled girls and all their works and pomps.
‘In this illimitable country!’ he said.
Unvesting sadly after Mass, emptied by the excesses of the pulpit, he tried to say the derobing prayers. Even more than normally they seemed to him shrines of words vacated by the deity. The question was whether it was necessarily due to a fault in him, Maitland, the beadsman? Or was the shrine too old, too far gone, too long outgrown by whatever God it once held? He was down to his alb when someone knocked at the door. ‘Yes,’ he sang, without cause to sing. He expected a woman in a floral hat with a Mass offering, and she would expect him to be joyous, the Lord’s skipping lamb down from the mountain.
What appeared was the smooth head-prefect face of Des Boyle, frowning.
Maitland rid himself of the alb and the room of acolytes.
‘Father,’ Boyle said then, ‘it both is my business and isn’t my business to say this. I think you’re being very unwise.’
‘I see.’ Limp though he was, Maitland became fortuitously enraged to have his words accused of practical silliness when he had himself already accused them of moral folly. ‘I would have thought that with your involvement in charity you’d be pleased to see a social ill exposed.’
Boyle fondled his fat missal, breathing deeply and devising an answer. At last he said, ‘I am able to appreciate irony, father. I caught all the irony you threw at me that night at the cathedral, even though His Grace, who’s a better man than either of us, seemed to see none at all. You resent the Knights, don’t you, father?’
Maitland had had time to be ashamed by now – short passion and long shame seemed to be the order of his life; and he began to give the vestments on the bench little evasive, housewifely tugs. He said, ‘I haven’t any right to dislike anybody who doesn’t do active harm. I merely thought Quinlan was outside your province.’
‘Now, father,’ Boyle insisted, ‘that wasn’t all.’
‘No.’
‘As a Knight, I’d prefer you voiced your resentments.’
‘I don’t like secret societies,’ Maitland granted. ‘I don’t like the spirit of Let’s all get together and enjoy the unique dignity of being Catholics –’
‘As if that counted for nothing,’ Boyle murmured.
‘– or worse still, Let’s all get together and pull strings better than those Masonic gents.’
‘I hope you know more about land-dealing than you do about the Knights, Dr Maitland. I would hate to see any priest made to look foolish.’
‘You have considerable powers of irony yourself, Mr Boyle.’
‘I mean what I say,’ the Knight emphasized. ‘I’d be very sorry. You see, every line of business has its own complexities and conventions …’
‘What I spoke of from the pulpit can’t be explained away as a complexity or a convention.’
‘I say it can. I do the auditing for a development company, and –’
Maitland smacked his own cassocked thigh.
‘You’re not their much-vaunted Papal Knight?’
‘Yes. The managing director telephoned me the other day to say that an angry young priest called Father Maitland had been in the office. He’s not one of my closest friends, but I could tell he was nonplussed and a little shaken. When I found you here this morning, in the pulpit, in my own parish, I thought at first it might save embarrassment if I went outside. But a person still has an obligation to attend Mass.’
‘So you remained.’
‘Yes.’
While a nun of the parish dashed into the sacristy to wash the wine and water cruets, the two men kept an unquiet silence. Maitland had leisure to see that he had dealt with Boyle as with an unbidden meddler. When the nun had the cruets dry and had gone off in search of further handmaidenly tasks, he announced, ‘You must forgive me if I sounded aggressive, Mr Boyle. I didn’t quite realize your interest in the matter.’
Boyle was generous enough to brush the apologies aside with the butt of his honest hand.
‘It’s a question of the conventions of the business. If you took the case of a toothpaste manufacturer –’
‘But I took the case of a soap manufacturer with your managing director. I don’t suppose it differs from the case of the toothpaste manufacturer?’
‘Exaggerated claims and so on?’
‘That’s right. Mr Boyle, that argument is cant.’
‘Perhaps. We’ll see later. There are economic reasons for the high price of land and I’ll outline them first.’ Boyle’s conscience was firm, he was himself both lucid and sure. A structure of costs prevailed in the community and, to fit this structure, it was necessary that land should cost what it cost. A development company had a responsibility to its staff and to other development companies and their staffs. Responsible behaviour towards a structure of prices rebounded to the employee as an increase in wages.
Even to Maitland it sounded dated – greed for my brothers’ sakes. Yet it was believed by this decent man, it lived and did well under the brilliantined scalp, in the unimpeachable soul of Des Boyle.
‘I had my crisis of conscience on this matter, don’t you worry, father. So I took the question to one of the most renowned confessors in the archdiocese. He asked me whether their advertising told the conventional half-truths that are current in the profession. I said it did. He said, “The sort of promise no one but the simpleminded takes seriously?” I said yes again. I also made it clear that I did not actually work for them, that I was a separate firm who merely did their auditing. He assured me that I need not worry. I then assured myself, for health’s sake, that my conscience was correctly informed. I still believe that it is correctly informed. What say you, father?’
Maitland nodded. ‘Who am I to tell you otherwise?’
‘You are a priest.’
‘Oh yes …’
‘Father, if you are going to be so certain in the pulpit, if you damn – out of conviction – people whom I’m bound to by contract, then you owe it to me to
be certain now.’
‘You mean you want me to damn you too?’
‘I want you to tell me what you think of my position.’
‘Your position isn’t a simple one. All I know about is them. I don’t know about you. I wouldn’t have the presumption.’
‘But you have the grace of your state. Of Holy Orders.’
‘Don’t bank on that.’
Unwittingly, Maitland had been giving rope. There were sudden signs of anger in Boyle – he did not gesture with the missal, but his sober hands began to strangle it.
‘You simply want to raise doubts but not to solve them. That’s hardly fair, father.’
‘Oh, Mr Boyle.’ Maitland took the chalice and locked it away in a wall-safe. The move, which the priest made merely to fill a nasty hiatus in their interview, chastened the layman by giving a sight of a sacred vessel in a priestly hand.
Seeing this change in Boyle, Maitland said, ‘Your conscience isn’t mediated to you by priests. You were sure I was wrong about The Meanings of God. Feel free to be sure I’m wrong now.’
‘After you were so convinced in the pulpit,’ Boyle once more maintained, ‘you owe me a judgment on how I stand.’
Maitland shook his head. ‘Even if I’m right about them, it doesn’t necessarily change how you stand. My conscience is no special conscience, just one man’s. I can only judge the simple things. Like this.’
And he placed on the bench, beside Boyle, the newspaper cutting Joe had given him.
‘So you leave me uncertain?’ Boyle rebuked him.
‘Damn it all, it’s good for a man to be uncertain. Certainty’s only a front-end of a beast whose backside is bigotry. Look how bigoted I am about Allied Projects!’
So Des Boyle gave Maitland a look that meant, ‘We feed and clothe you and you give us certitude in return. That sublime contract is broken in you!’
He said, ‘I won’t bother you any further, doctor.’
One Sunday later, he preached the sermon again in what pastors delight in calling ‘a solid parish’, among people who had what statesmen persist in calling ‘a fair slice of the economic cake’, yet who had also some affinity with the Joe Quinlans.