‘Yes, but that’s easily said, isn’t it? Although they say he knows a lot about priests and religious, that doctor.’
‘Yes. He doesn’t like the way we’re trained. He thinks it’s anti-human.’
‘Well, of course,’ Maitland said, buttoning his fly, ‘that’s no secret.’
‘He agrees with you about the will,’ Hurst announced, opting for academic questions so that personal ones should not be raised. ‘He says that we are taught that the will can conquer anything and that we wear our will out by trying not to – in my case – maim people.’
‘But he doesn’t exactly believe that one should give in, does he?’ Maitland asked sunnily. ‘Give in and cut away?’
Hurst winced. ‘No. He thinks that other methods should be used. Utter serenity.’
‘My God! If you were capable of utter serenity you wouldn’t have troubled him.’
‘He gave me some pills and I’m to go back in a week.’
Hurst wanted, with every pore of his unsunned flesh, that that should be the end of the interview.
‘Are you any better?’ Maitland asked him.
‘Yes. I have these pills.’
‘What about the letter he gave you?’ It had to be asked bluntly. ‘Surely he gave you a letter for me?’
‘Oh, no.’ Hurst began to comb the tassels of the biretta with his fingers. It was the type of gesture that goes with not-too-artful lying or, on the other hand, with complete guilelessness. ‘He didn’t seem to think that I was any sort of serious case. Only bluffed, as I said.’
‘Could I do anything?’
‘No. It’s very kind of you to have taken this much interest.’
Maitland laughed as kindly as he could and patted the boy’s shoulder. ‘You’re not mad, Hurst, but you have to take yourself seriously. I actually found you burying the cutlery. Polite terms like “very kind of you to take this much interest” don’t enter into it. Now, did he give you a letter?’
‘No,’ Hurst said, hardly friendly, and gripped the three-peaked hat in both fists.
Maitland already felt disgusted by the tone of annoyance that seemed native to his dealing with Hurst. He said, ‘Please trust me. If I sound angry, it’s because futile sicknesses do make one angry.’
‘Of course, doctor.’ Hurst was still a gentleman; he woefully lacked the desperation that brings man to a cure. ‘And I will keep you informed of the treatment.’
At the same time Egan too was using every facility the house offered for the avoidance of Maitland. They seemed to meet only in places where silence or near-silence was the rule – noticeably, as before, in the passageway behind the high altar. Each nodded to the other over the chalice he bore; two liturgical denizens in green or white or scarlet chasubles. No doubt Egan suspected Maitland of thinking along juridical lines: here is a man who punched a woman; what right has he to don a chasuble over that atrocity? Maitland, whose atrocity was that he belonged to nothing and agonized for no one, could have boxed Egan’s blunt little ears.
Meanwhile, loss, guilt and regeneration brought to that bland face the delayed puberty of a frown.
One eleven o’clock, returning from the classroom, Maitland caught sight of Egan’s boyish coat-tails making the short dash from the end stairs to the back door. Maitland ran after him, cassock whooping like bellows. The quarry was still palely fiddling with car keys when James caught him among the vehicles.
‘Heard from Celia or Nora, Maurice?’ Maitland asked, invoking Celia’s name purely as a reprisal.
‘The plane arrived safely.’
‘They mainly do these days.’
He thought: One thing about being vengeful; you know you’re alive. It’s wine. It’s a drug.
‘James,’ said Egan, ‘James, I’d prefer it if we both forgot those two names.’
‘Oh. Now you’re back to the stable life, you want to forget your old friends?’
‘Never, James. I’ll never forget what you’ve done. But …’
‘Never forget what I’ve done? You sound as if you’re going away.’
‘No. No.’ He raised his elbows as if under suspicion of carrying a change of clothing beneath the armpits.
Maitland said, ‘Listen, Maurice, if you want to be quit of me because I’m associated in your mind with given acts of valour of yours, such as clocking a certain fishwife, hereinafter anonymous, to her own and my intense delight – if you want to be quit of me because I’m some sort of living emblem of your sins, or what you consider to be sins, then just tell me.’
Egan turned over his keys one by one as if they carried apt quotations from Ecclesiastes or St Augustine.
‘Well,’ Maitland insisted, ‘tell me!’
‘That’s not the problem. What sort of man do you think I am?’
‘If you think when we pass in that bloody dismal tunnel behind the altar that I wonder whether you’re saying Mass “in the state of sin”’ – he gestured two handfuls of inverted commas either side of the time-worn expression – ‘then you’re a great damned fool offering the worst damned insult that ever I’ve suffered.’
‘That’s not the problem either.’
‘My God,’ called Maitland, with a further gesture which the books of piety would have described as inordinate. ‘You are a tortuous bastard!’
‘You’re a young priest, Maitland. How old are you?’
‘Full twenty-nine years have I,’ Maitland said, still petulant.
‘Full thirty-seven have I,’ Egan announced without enthusiasm. ‘Like all older priests, I owe you an example. I owe you some edification. In fact, I have given you not a thing other than certain cynical insights –’
‘Oh God. Now I can’t even take the credit for my own cynicism!’
‘You’re right to be angry.’
‘Oh, stop pretending to humility. It resolves itself down to this. Either you do me the credit of letting me decide for myself whether you’re such an old reprobate that I shouldn’t mix with you, or else we stop all pretence at acquaintanceship. One more curt nod at table and you can get someone else to dole out your secrets to.’
Then, under the influence of a strange spasm, the desire to top Egan’s guilt, Maitland went on, ‘If you think you’re the only one with a sizeable shame, let me tell you about mine.’
And although it was no sort of enormity to him that he had published without ecclesiastical permission, it was and always would be a genuine enormity to Egan, being for him part of that inalienable citadel of the conscience which even murderers have, the things one would never do. So Maitland told him about The Meanings of God, and watched him.
‘My goodness!’
‘Go on, then. Treat me as a leper.’
‘Don’t talk rot.’
‘Ah!’ said Maitland. ‘That is my very point. Either we take the rot as read, or else.’
‘That book,’ said Egan. ‘James, that’s a superb book. And it was written by a priest, as the publisher claimed.’
Maitland laughed. ‘You mean that if a Catholic wrote it there may be some truth in it?’
‘I mean that it’s superb book. You really are a very bright young fellow for twenty-nine.’
‘Jump at yourself, Reverend Egan.’
Maurice, on the brunt of Maitland’s information, had managed to open the door of his small car. Then he stood up straight and put out his hand. ‘Rot as read?’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘We’ll take the rot as read?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Really, a marvellous book, James. Do you intend doing anything about it?’
‘My opus?’ Maitland asked. ‘Let it die without recriminations.’
When Joe Quinlan telephoned him, Maitland – for the first time since the blonde reporter had come visiting – suffered a momentary sense of betrayal. He said into the receiver, ‘Want another loan, Joe?’ So, with abject ease, he made a mock of any forbearance he might have practised in the past or might practise in the future. Not that f
orbearance itself hadn’t been abjectly easy. He had awarded the money to someone who meant nothing to him, who was, by conventional standards, totally undeserving. These were the conditions he had set himself, and by its nature, the very giving was an insult and deserved traducing.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Joe said painfully. ‘I wanted to apologize.’
And if Maitland now felt a panic rush to reassure Joe, and if he said nothing, it was because his brand of reassurance was likely to be taken for sarcasm.
‘If you could come tonight, father?’ wondered Joe. ‘You won’t be able to come home because they’re trying their best to get us out of the place, but I could meet you at the bus-stop. We could have a talk. You know.’
The electronic mysteries of a telephone exchange crackled in the pause, while Maitland weighed the tensions of creation, demanding release, at the back of his brain. For though he had not yet attacked that rampantly gentile beast called the novel, he had yet begun taking notes (upstairs, only seven yards distant from the nearest Couraigne painting, only fifteen yards from the nearest moral theologian) which were nearly the real thing. Balancing their claims against Joe’s, he heard Joe say, ‘By Jesus, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not that, Joe. It’s just that you live so far away.’
‘Not any more,’ Joe said. The Quinlans lived in a new place, only they were trying to get them out of it. Joe’s they was that terrible pronoun of the working class, embracing the cabinet, the insurance companies, organized Christianity, the price-control board, the breweries. Maitland suffered a second’s fluorescent vision of his own father waiting grey with loss outside a casualty ward, telling the skinny theological student who Maitland once was, ‘They won’t let us have her. They say there’s got to be an autopsy.’
He flinched. ‘I suppose,’ he decided, full of proletarian tenderness, ‘I could catch the bus.’
An hour later he found Joe hunched against a locked and blazing appliance store. They were both cold and, without overcoats, seemed outdated in the glare of that new shopping-centre. Still, it was Maitland’s business not to blend into the landscape of new suburbs. All the rebuke of the lit galleries was on Joe’s tweedy shoulders.
As Maitland came up, Joe let his shivers run mad so that he would not be forced to notice the mockery or other-cheekness of Maitland’s extended hand. They asked after each other’s health, while the wind stropped itself on acres of plate glass and filleted the two of them in their corner.
‘Shout you a cup of coffee?’ suggested Maitland. He blushed for being in the right, and found it impossible to look at Joe’s face, which was trying to cope with its own problems. He stared therefore at the display window behind them, and read the chrome badge of an automatic washing-machine, read its labelled buttons, its citation of red cardboard, its blue arrow indicating the spinner that was ‘Tarzan-tough and Galahad-tender’. The influence of G. M. Hopkins on advertising, Maitland thought. If Costello were a woman, he – she – would own that machine.
‘I just left the table,’ Joe said. Morna’s table, stew and one pumpkin-stained little boy.
‘Come on,’ Maitland commanded.
The Hungarian-proprietor was glad to have a reverend client, or any client, this raw night. Both cousins felt a shy access of cheerfulness as they sat down under his smile and the insinuating smells of his coffee machine.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t take you home,’ Joe said again, as he had on the telephone. ‘But they call sometimes of a night, and if they called while you were there, Morna’d throw a fit.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The people from Allied Projects. They say that Clark had no right to offer us the house.’
‘Clark?’
‘That manager bloke.’
‘Clark offered you a house?’ Maitland could not stop smiling sideways. Paris is worth a Mass, he thought, Maitland is worth a three-bedroom brick cottage with shingle roof.
‘Rent-free like.’
‘A good house?’
Joe put his face in his hands. ‘I wish to Christ it was ours,’ he said.
‘They’re trying to break their promise?’
‘They say he had no right. When I telephoned him he said it was out of his hands, that he’s retiring in September.’
‘Typical of them,’ James murmured, aligning himself with his dead father and with Joe.
Joe said, ‘It was hard enough to say them things about you …’
‘I know.’ Maitland quashed the melodrama by slapping his right knee a number of times. Then he said softly, ‘I know. Bad enough, without all this.’
‘Don’t you mind what I said?’
Maitland smiled gingerly while the proprietor himself, and not his acned cashier, laid down two coffees as tenderly as kittens before them.
‘Thank you,’ Maitland said to the man’s departing and gratified buttocks; and to Joe, ‘I know you’ll always take a serious view of the affair, Joe. But you see, I’m not a career priest, so I can’t be hurt in that way. They aren’t sweating on me to turn forty just so that they can give me a cardinal’s hat.’
They both laughed, still very shy. But Joe went sombre without warning. ‘We really needed a place of our own. You know.’
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.
16
NOW EGAN 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 S
tudies 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?’