‘But if the husband was quite clearly unbalanced –’ Maitland began, realizing too late that Egan must often have had this debate with himself.
‘I had no one but myself to consult. At the time, I thought to myself that I owed it to my colleague in W———, to the bond of marriage, which is surely sacred –’
‘Of course it’s sacred.’
‘– and to the church itself. I’d had very little experience of women. In any case, I seemed well and truly bound.’
‘Was it as bad as she expected?’
‘Nobody concocts these things for the torment of humans. Not even canon lawyers.’ His eyes, freighted with discovery, sought Maitland’s. ‘The conflict between law and charity, James, is sometimes insoluble.’
This, though no great news, Egan had reached his mid-thirties before suspecting. Maitland felt that he owed it to his friend to say dubiously, like a young man who has not yet seen the inside of the crucible, ‘I suppose so.’
‘Nora ended the examination in a state of hysterics. Some weeks later, a decree of inconsummation was issued. That meant that Nora was free of her husband, free to marry again.’
James smiled. ‘I do know that much canon law.’
‘Nora entered a psychiatric hospital then. I didn’t know – she was on the mend before I knew. You see, one afternoon I was stopped by Celia at a charity bazaar and accused at top note of destroying her sister. People all round me were absolutely transfixed listening to Celia calling on the divine mercy to strike me down. She doesn’t care whom she embarrasses, that Celia.’
‘Jockeys and priests,’ James murmured.
‘I visited Nora and asked forgiveness. That was as extraordinary a thing to do as it would be for a doctor to apologize for causing pain. But this is the essence of the affair, James, this is what I could never make other confessors swallow; I had been too willing to apply the law in her case. One likes too much to be able to depend on a blanket law, one likes to be able to apply it without consideration of individuals. It is one of the dangers of our work.’
Maitland affirmed, ‘Someone has to be defensor vinculi;’ and thought, ‘Who would, superficially, seem more suited than neat Maurice Egan?’
‘I was so used to being inflexible,’ Egan further explained. ‘I was surrounded by men who were used to being inflexible. So that whenever I confessed my part in Nora’s breakdown they always said what you have just said; that it was my duty. The difference is that they were sure of it, whereas you are only being kind.’
Maitland disagreed.
‘Oh no, you’re what they call a humanist, James.’ Satire was apparent on the thin lips. ‘Even Dr Costello says so.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘Seriously, James. You are what they call a loner. You are impatient of law, and the reason is that if all men were like you, there would not need to be any laws.’
‘Hell!’ said James. ‘Stick to sarcasm, will you?’
Without ceremony, Egan reverted to Nora. ‘I was very busy then, but somehow I found time to visit her again. She was so polite to me, and at the same time continuously afraid. Not of me, though. We walked around the grounds, but kept returning to the front of the building so that she could see whether her doctor’s car was there. He wasn’t due there that day, in any case, but she would hold herself very stiffly until she was sure that he hadn’t arrived. Then she would let herself go limp and would begin to smile and chat again. It was – well, a terrible smile in the circumstances. She would be too full of joy. Then we’d stroll away again, around the gardens. Within five minutes she would want to assure herself again that the doctor hadn’t come. It was so strange. She attributed unlimited powers of deception to that poor man, and yet she actually considered me as some sort of protector. She had no doubt that he intended to violate her, as she believed the periti had done.’
‘My God!’ Maitland called out sincerely, seeing that a dilemma of classic proportions had overtaken this far-from-classic little priest.
‘Perhaps my intentions were bad. I don’t know. But it seemed to me – not that there was anything I could do – however, it seemed that I must come back and keep track, more or less, of her return to health.’
‘Yes,’ Maitland said, ‘that seems an honest decision to me. And I’m the one wearing the stole.’
‘But we get so used from childhood to making our decisions seem honest. I can remember how in my last year at high school we had a teacher who taught us literature. He was an enthusiast, but somehow he seemed to bore the boys. At the end of the year he told us that he was very sorry and that it was his own fault, but we were going to fail the literature section in great numbers. He said that each time he thought of giving us a critical exercise, he remembered how little we knew and decided that he would wait until he had given us another two or three essential ideas. And he would give us the two or three essential ideas, during which we would doze or do our mathematics.’
‘You doze? I can’t imagine little Maurice Egan dozing in class.’
‘Little Maurice Egan was destined to become defensor vinculi,’ said Egan in seemly but unmistakable self-hatred. ‘I speak of the class as a whole. In any case the teacher was right, and more than not failed, because he couldn’t release their minds long enough to let them have their own say, however clumsy. It has been exactly the same case with myself and Nora. The time when I could say good-bye to Nora was always two or three weeks away.’
He came to an end of eloquence, lowered his head and said, ‘Advise me, James.’
Maitland protested. ‘Come on now, Maurice. You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Especially at this kind of lark.’
‘Don’t say that. You’re the confessor. Don’t you believe that the grace of the sacrament could make you wiser than yourself?’
The question made Maitland self-conscious and betrayed him into a silence that couldn’t help but be sceptical.
For his part, Egan was betrayed into peevishness. ‘Sometimes,’ he announced, ‘one can sense a particularly annoying quality about you, James – in the way you consistently refuse to be impressed by old ways, old habits of thought. In case you didn’t know, that is precisely why Nolan and Costello always expect the worst of you.’
‘It must be very annoying. However, where would they be without someone to expect the worst of?’
‘Don’t waste your time turning the other cheek,’ Egan began, but slapped the top of his own head in mid-petulance, causing the hair to rise in brilliantined spikes. ‘Forgive me, James. I must seem laughable enough to you, a middle-aged priest seeking marriage.’
So, holding in his lap his consecrated hands, cupped as if damaged, he began to stare at them in a secretive manner, and saw the irony of his thirty-six holy years and of his not having dozed in the literature classes and failed like the honest majority. Maitland chanced putting a long, inept hand on his friend’s shoulder. He said, ‘I’m sure some solution can be found,’ forgetting that a solution had been found, that Nora was due to cross the world within days and leave Egan inviolate.
Then, still wearing the confessional-stole, but failing to recollect that the sacrament was still in progress, he went to the volumes of Migne and absently switched on the electric jug. He felt repelled by that Egan who sat benumbed, too much like a shocked child. So hard he stared at the harmless, yellow jug that he might have been able to see the murderous watts moving in it like sharks in an aquarium.
‘Well, James, what do you think?’
Harried, Maitland demanded, ‘How do you mean?’
‘About my guilt.’
‘Are you seriously asking me to –’
‘Yes. You are priest and judge.’
Maitland weaved his head. ‘Oh hell, Maurice …’
‘You must want to ask me questions.’
Maitland snorted. ‘All right. An obvious question. Did you ever try to stop seeing Nora?’
‘I was always telling her she seemed so much better and that this would be t
he last time we would meet. When I say always telling her, I mean about half a dozen times in the last year. Each time I meant it. Or at least I thought I meant it.’
‘What happened then?’ Maitland said almost brutally.
‘You must remember, James, that Nora was not a melodramatic woman. But each time, she’d say, “I don’t know whether I could stand it!”’
‘Your departure?’
‘Yes. She wasn’t the sort of woman to make such claims lightly. I learnt that much from her encounter with the periti.’
‘So you think she wouldn’t have been able to stand a breaking of the ties.’
Maitland’s hostility had begun to wash off on the penitent, who said, ‘Is that a question I had a right to ask myself, James? I mean to say, one would not risk the mental balance of one’s worst enemy.’
All desire to probe Egan’s blind side died now, leaving Maitland both ashamed and very grateful that the girl was having recourse, not to novenas, but to international airlines.
The two of them were unaccountably tired, as if they had wrestled with each other – a spiritual round or two for a pound or two which had not done anyone any good.
‘If she said she couldn’t stand it,’ Egan murmured, ‘it was the truth.’
‘The whole blame is yours?’
‘Practically.’
‘It’s a bit Asian, friend Egan, to assume that someone is to blame for every human situation.’
Egan sighed. ‘This isn’t a bit like a confession. You owe me a judgment.’
‘Well I don’t damn-well want to give one. Do you want me to say “not guilty” just for the sake of comforting you? I said it at the start and I still say it. Not Guilty. And now I think you should let the subject lie.’
There was an absolution, which Egan accepted with disconsolate bowed head.
A minute or so later, nibbling a biscuit, he said, ‘Anyhow, perhaps Nora will meet someone on her – journey.’ He laid the word down like lead on the brittle hope. ‘Some businessman or grazier from this side of things. They say London’s full of them.’ He could have been talking of forests full of tigers.
Just as Maitland’s contest with Allied Projects began, he had been following an absorbing line of research at the public library. He was suddenly exalted to find that much of the material he had gathered demanded to be treated in some extended form; in fact, in a dangerous form for any priest – the novel. So his working-day became a short creative fever in the reading-room, encompassed by those waste levels of time in which he occupied a place at table, taught, timed his meditations, and had the Egan conscience forced on him.
‘We just have time, James,’ Egan said on a crucial morning. ‘Please. It seems indecent not to be there for this.’
‘But I have a class at eleven.’
‘We’ll be there no more than ten minutes.’
‘But listen, Maurice. What if the thing is held up and we have to leave before it goes? That would be worse than inconclusive.’
‘Please, James,’ was all that Egan said.
Maitland drove Egan’s small car. Within half a mile of the airport, creeping among tankers and busfuls of travellers, assailed by hoardings offering foreign cities and the wine and girls of foreign cities, Maitland began to suffer the sick sense of being alien to his native city. What he was especially grateful for was that he did not dress well – his badly worn shoes did not look like those of a man who could afford a ticket to London; his old coat at least gave him some specious claim to representing eternal values. He would otherwise not be able to move in the terminal building without being challenged by eyes.
Transitory then, but compelling gazes as much as any eternal value, stood the London-bound jet.
‘We mustn’t meet them,’ Egan said. ‘There’s some sort of veranda upstairs.’
Maitland laughed, and said in a voice like a municipal alderman’s. ‘In this day and age, we call them observation decks.’
‘Very well,’ hissed Egan, and pounced at the staircase as if fleeing loreleis in the lounge.
Upstairs, the wind tugging at their forlorn black hats, Maitland had some advice for his friend. ‘Anyone who has ever said good-bye to someone –’
‘I am not saying good-bye,’ Egan insisted.
‘Anyhow, they say this is the most difficult to accept. These jets climb into the sun and vanish within a minute. People feel it’s improper to have friends taken so quickly. I thought I should warn you.’
‘Thank you,’ Egan said.
He made Maitland hide behind a family of wealthy Italians as the passengers appeared from the terminal doorway. There was Nora in a rich check coat, long-and full-legged in claret-coloured stockings. She turned once to wave cursorily in the direction from which she had come. It was a gesture like a blessing given by a priest who is sick of his priesthood. As she entered the plane, Egan said, ‘She could see us from a window, James. I’m sorry. We must go back downstairs.’
They sheltered in a bus bay, listened to the machine snarl, felt its exhaust heat their faces like an indefinable reproach, saw it trundle away, turn and, gathering all its inevitable knots per hour compactly behind its wings, rise and vanish. Maitland had been right; decency demanded more ceremony: the streamers, say, that are strung between wharf and inching liner.
Egan said desperately, ‘It’s amazing how they can get those monstrous things up.’
The incompleteness of the good-bye kept them waiting in silence in the bay for two or three minutes. As they looked down the vacant runway shining with a light that was nearly crystalline, Maitland sensed that his friend’s composure was so cliff-edge that even a pat on the shoulder would disturb it. At last Egan sniffed drily.
‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything else happening.’
But, of course, Celia also had waited, absorbed in an empty sky. Convinced at the same time as Egan that, however expansive, it would produce nothing, she emerged at the terminal front door when the two priests were twenty yards away. On seeing them, she mopped tears off her cheeks with two fast swipes of a tissue.
‘It’s beloved Maurice,’ she said in full voice. She wore the enamel, corsets-are-killing-me smile of the professional entertainer. Both priests cringed. Both wondered whether her high-calibre tongue had their retreat to the parking-area covered; both decided that, as with pythons and tigers, the best chance was utter immobility. ‘And James, the friend of the alcoholic.’ Other bon-voyagers, coming out of doors chewing over their inadequate farewells, caught the suggestion of a scene in her voice, glimpsed the two Roman collars, and bolted. ‘She whom thou seekest is not here,’ said Celia in a venomous parody. ‘She is risen, Alleluia. She is gone before you into Chelsea where dwelleth her pub-owning aunt, Mrs Beatrice Flanigan.’
Egan said, ‘She hasn’t gone before me. She’s simply gone.’
‘Surely you can get a discount trip out of some pious wop airline.’
‘I wouldn’t want to. She’s far better off without the two of us.’
Maitland ventured to say, ‘I think this is only going to cause pain to both of you. Perhaps if you –’
‘Not in mufti today, father?’ Celia observed cursorily, and then, ‘Maurice, did you happen to see the wave my grateful sister gave me? You would have thought she was brushing scurf off her shoulder. That bloody dry-wife of yours … A flap of the hand. I think we’ve both been used by that sweet child. One day, when she’s sitting in her flat with some extreme form of male – she’s got a talent for extreme forms – priest and eunuch so far – when she’s sitting there with her next freak, she’ll mention off-handedly that she once was involved with a defensor vinculi. She’ll say, “Do you know what a defensor vinculi is, darling?” And he, out of the special insight given him by his having only one leg or one eye or a really elegant hare-lip, will say –’
What, Maitland did not hear, because Egan, with a bunched fist, struck her on the cheek. It was more, even, than she had hoped for.
Having to lead
her away and soothe her, having to lead an Egan who hid his face in his hands three hundred yards to the car, Maitland became even more intensely grateful for his unworldly shoes.
While Maitland drove, Egan sat solving the simultaneous equations: A man who strikes a woman is an utter coward and Maurice Egan, not thought to be an utter coward, has yet struck a woman. By the time they parked in the stone bay behind the House he was still limp and far from a solution; and, behind any solution, lay the untouched mass of his grief.
15
DISTRUST OF MAITLAND characterized Hurst over the following week. Three days after he had been due to visit the doctor, Maitland had still not heard if he had kept the appointment. Maitland, approaching, would see him flit into doorways and up staircases. It was when you wanted to speak to somebody who didn’t want to speak to you that you realized how some Victorian architect, of talents stolid as plum-duff, had constructed without trying a house fit for the chase sequence of a Marx Brothers’ comedy.
Maitland ran him down by accident. It was a weekday morning and a High Mass was, for some liturgical reason, being intoned in the chapel. James, on his way upstairs from saying his own Mass, stopped by in the downstairs toilet and found Hurst, stock-still in surplice, soutane and biretta, staring at his own anguish in the mirror above the basins. Seeing Maitland, he jumped back and stood at bay.
‘Good morning,’ called Maitland, breezing up to a urinal.
‘Good morning, doctor.’
‘Go to the doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. What did he say?’
‘He said I was letting myself be bluffed by this – you know – compulsion.’