The woman on the bed raised one lean thigh and mumbled, ‘It is three weeks since my last confession.’
Egan’s eyes blinked open.
‘You see, I must take her home myself,’ he explained. ‘I’m responsible in so many ways. But more than a matter of responsibility, it would be a terrible injustice to send her home in a taxi, like a common drunk. You see?’
‘Since then,’ moaned the woman, ‘I have been guilty on several occasions of criticizing the clergy …’
‘She lives with a sister,’ Maurice explained. ‘What I’m going to ask is so appalling that I can’t ask it gently. You see, the sister knows me. If I drive her home, will you take her to the door?’
‘In corduroy and denims?’
Egan’s eyes dropped. ‘Perhaps not the denims.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to arrive as we are and simply tell the sister what happened?’
The little priest turned half away, snorting.
‘Very well,’ Maitland assured him. ‘Whatever you like.’
‘You’d better wear those suedes too, James. I’m sorry for being impatient, but this is a dreadful come-uppance. To speak brutally, a man dressed as a priest or known to be one can’t deliver an unconscious woman at her front door. I wonder could you wear a hat? And I’ve got an old pair of reading-glasses you might like to put on.’
‘Anything you say, Maurice. But I begin to sound like a white-slaver.’
‘You’ve every right to tell me to jump at myself. Tell me, can you drive, James?’
Egan’s small car lay in the cold bay of night between the south and central wings of the house. Symbolic of its master’s dilemma, it was crowded by the president’s antique juggernaut of a Riley on one side and on the other by Costello’s one hundred press-button horsepowers. Maitland found it hard to open the door wide. In this House, the passenger’s doors of vehicles never had to be swung full-stretch to admit plump or laden wives. The narrow quarters in which the staff parked their cars testified their celibacy.
Maitland put his equipment in the back seat. The hat did not go well with the glasses and neither of them went with the coat, and as far as he was concerned, still feeling gay and conspiratorial to the exclusion of nearly every other emotion, any woman whose sister was brought home drunk by a man wearing all three should have straightaway called for the police. However, he put suede shoes, hat, glasses, coat, in the passenger’s seat and brought the car, lights out, to the main door.
There was no one in the downstairs parlour or the library. Upstairs, the washroom was empty, though the lights burned wide-awake. Maitland grinned at them as no Christian should. Eight cents extra on Nolan’s electricity bill. Now that Compline was over, all that could be heard was the typewriter of one of the priests punching out ‘Tertullian’s Theory of Baptism’ or ‘The Meaning of Kerigma in St Paul’ for some theological review.
The thirty yards from Egan’s room to the staircase was the only danger. Maitland stood still for a second and listened a last time. It was worth it, he thought, and his heart expanded shamelessly with excitement. Fuelled by esoteric knowledge, the typewriter maintained speed and the urinals seethed in the washroom. On the floor above, some student avoiding starlight or a draught hauled his bed across the floor. But even this merely made the quiet more tangible.
Carrying the woman was what sobered Maitland. On the narrow stairs, he had her by the knees while Egan managed the shoulders. There was an immediacy about her limp body that made sobriety imperative, or at least fitting. Sobriety for its own sake, not for the sake of chastity. As a youth he had taught himself and been taught a series of celibate’s tricks and had learnt them too well. Now he found it too easy to remember that this woman shared her species with Morna Quinlan, was mortal and menstrual, and would distend with child and decline with child-bearing. He found it too easy to remember that whoever had her had a season’s fruit. Thinking so had generations of celibates succeeded at their trade. Yet Maitland knew that if he wanted the vision of God he must arrive at a more substantial purity than what was provided by these ploys of mental focus.
They wondered how they would get her into the back of the car. It was easier than they feared. After the passage of the stairs, she was willing to fall purring along the length of the seat. Egan covered her with a rug, quickly, and shut the door on her unguardedly feminine groans.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Maitland,’ he said. ‘I could think of no other solution than this.’
Just the same, he took unrepentantly to the wheel and drove fast and with great skill. It must have been midnight by now, but the lit suburbs and highways had not yet succumbed to the Sabbath. After ten minutes the girl woke up, calling, ‘Maurice I want to be sick.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Egan told her gently and drove into a side-street to park.
Being uneasy for her, Maitland didn’t look. Behind both priest’s backs, the lovely woman retched. The cruel sound and crueller reek were terribly intimate in the little car.
She started to cry. ‘Forgive me, Maurice.’
‘It doesn’t matter. But you were very foolish to start drinking.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
Maitland’s stomach began to jump at the stench. He got his window down and, as the car moved off again, would have thrust his face out into the sweet night, except that that would have reflected on the lady.
She said unevenly, ‘When you’re unhappy enough, you try these queer things. Whisky. You know.’
‘You didn’t go around hotels, did you, Nora?’
‘Celia’s place.’
‘That’s something.’
‘I want to go to sleep, Maurice.’
‘Before you do, Nora, I don’t think it wise to tell Celia you’ve been to the House of Studies. You’d be so pestered. You don’t mind my saying so?’
‘Beg your pardon, Maurice?’ she said after a long time.
‘I say, we won’t tell Celia you’ve been over to the House of Studies,’ Egan repeated slowly.
‘No. Righto.’ She clearly felt much better, but not much more sober. ‘You’re the expert on the morals of white lies, Maurice.’ She giggled.
‘You realize, my motives aren’t cowardly. But you’ll be sick enough tomorrow without having Celia persecuting you. This is a friend of mine called James. James, this is Nora.’
Egan spoke at top voice and could be heard panting at the end of each sentence. It seemed unfair that this dutiful little cleric, wearing on his lapel the badge of a temperance organization which the Irish pungently called ‘The Sacred Thirst’, should have the ordering of such a crisis.
‘James will take you to the door, Nora.’
James is a fool, thought James.
Behind them the woman, nearly asleep, said, ‘Whisky keeps more people going than sanctifying grace does.’
‘You know that’s not true, Nora.’
Nora’s tears began to creak out, but before long she fell asleep.
Egan and Maitland composed a story for the sister. Maitland would, if caught at the door by Celia, explain that he was an acquaintance of Nora’s, that he’d seen her in this state – Egan thought up a likely locality – and brought her home by taxi; yes, taxi was what Celia would have to be told. ‘She knows my car,’ Egan explained. ‘Now you’ll have to be firm with her, James. Simply refuse to tell her more. Pretend to be very angry at her aggressive attitude. Don’t worry, she will have an aggressive attitude. Neither of the Tully girls has been lucky in love. Neither. Celia’s separated husband, whom I met once, described her as a castrating bitch.’
Maitland laughed softly at his friend’s unexpected brusqueness.
‘Of course, Nora,’ Egan went on, ‘Nora is a tragedy. And I just know that it will be easier for her, tonight and tomorrow, if her sister doesn’t think she’s been to see me. Celia will pat her shoulder and make her a cup of tea and say, “Look what they’ve driven you to, love.” But if that woman – well, if she suspected my presence, that I had a
ny part, however passive, in the business … That’s why I say you must be firm, James.’
They were now in a slow stream of cars in the lively-deathly part of the city. Sailors accosted girls, and boys walked hand in hand, and the blue flesh of strippers simpered and risked hernia in dozens of extreme poses in the window displays.
Driving unevenly in low gear, Maurice said further, ‘If I am seen, Celia will not think twice of raising a riot in that street, even at this time of night. It’s not easy to judge people with one adjective, but I think it’s true to say she’s jealous – madly jealous for her sister. She shall protect Nora, even if she protects her to death, as it were.’
Frowning over traffic, Egan’s face stained blue and gold and orange as the car edged. All the street subsisted in a medium of crude light, light seeming to have at its core an artist’s mistake which successive layers of wash had been unable to remedy. Maitland watched faces, so unassertive under the brash assertiveness of the neons. He said, just for the sake of chatter, ‘All that light. Maurice. Don’t you think it’s a final indecency to go into the lust-rousing business and then light every doorway up like a maharajah’s bathroom?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’ But all Egan’s mind was on veering the car away from a white Jaguar from whose high windows Nora could probably be seen. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘All I was saying was that if you’re going to make your living by rousing basic lusts, you shouldn’t floodlight all the doorways. A dark doorway’s basic enough for basic lusts. It may well be a crime above all others chief to set up lusts in one place and send them into another for the performance. You make people travel all that way thinking that they’re onto the essence of things.’
‘Oh,’ Egan suggested without interest, ‘they probably have facilities elsewhere on the premises, upstairs.’ He had no doubt read of such things in the books-of-the-film Maitland had seen in his room.
There came a break in the five-ways traffic.
Egan’s yellow-stained face triumphed and the car jolted away downhill. Below them, furled yachts lay on the bay, and the unsynthetic stars offered themselves for sightings to the Royal Yacht Club where a quarterly dance raged. Egan continued to coach Maitland.
‘Celia will attempt to pump you, but don’t let her. I believe your best hope is to skip out quick, as they say. I can’t keep on begging your pardon for what I’m asking you to do, James. A person’s desperation makes any fantastic scheme seem possible. I’m afraid this is a fantastic scheme. For one thing, why did I wear my clerical clothes?’
He slowed and began to remove them. He was handicapped by being temperamentally incapable of dragging them off. Even when he had shed his coat, he went on spying sideways at Maitland, who had undertaken to fold it over the back of the seat.
They came into a street where, Maitland thought, it would be easy to be happy. The houses were expensively unimpressive, and from gardens of long standing rose the lean sanity of pines and palms. Beyond parkland that faced the houses and stood utterly free of those white municipal threats about curbing dogs and dumping refuse, the bay was fledged with the quiet shapes of the yachts they had seen from the top of the hill. Egan parked the car.
‘I can’t go any farther, James. Celia’s is that house there.’ He pointed down the street to a stone bungalow with a terraced garden. Its lights shone. ‘I hope you wouldn’t think I was in any sense afraid of the woman.’
‘Of course not.’
With that, kneeling on the driver’s seat, Egan began to wake the girl.
‘Maurice,’ she said. ‘No, it’s James,’ said Maurice. ‘He’s going to take you home. Sit up, will you, Nora?’
She came halfway upright. Her hair swung in a sheath in front of her eyes, in the fashion of the movie queens of the forties. Fingering the seams of the upholstery, she was saying, ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned … It is umpteen years since my last confession, and since then I have been sick once in a priest’s car.’ She found this funny and adopted a solemn father-confessor voice. ‘That’s a very gravyous sin, my daughter. Don’t you know a priest’s car has to operate on all six celibates?’
Maitland got out and opened the woman’s door.
‘Maurice?’ she said again.
‘It’s James,’ Egan insisted. ‘You’ll have to give her your hand, James. Poor dear thing.’
‘Here you are, Nora,’ said Maitland, probing his open fist towards the reek. Her hand lighted in his gently and very cold. Feeling acutely estranged from himself, he began inexpertly to pull her to her feet. Yet she seemed to rise out of the car with little effort. He helped her to take a few steps along the footpath, and felt her legs give way alternately.
Egan, considering that Maitland and Nora had been properly launched, called, ‘Rest well, Nora.’
They hadn’t gone far when Nora began to chatter. ‘When I used to board in the convent at W———’ She said some indistinguishable native name that brought to Maitland’s mind white eucalypts awash in red dust – ‘we used to make up silly riddles, Maurice …’
‘James,’ Maitland grunted.
‘James. The parish priest of W——— always had a good car and he always told us what it had – you know, gears and ratios and diffs and so on. And I made up this riddle. I was very proud of it. I’ll tell you.’ Maitland looked as attentive as he could with his face averted from her fouled dress. ‘When is a biretta not a biretta?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When it’s a car-biretta.’ She giggled. ‘I’m quite lucid now. Just a bit nauseated.’
In fact she was at once sick again, making a shocking barking noise. Maitland tried to hold her by the shoulders. Finished, she remained bent forward; she breathed with an obvious sense of the goodness of breathing. Maitland’s stomach began to leap as it had in the car, finding her closeness hardly bearable. So, after a few seconds, did she. In a flash, she forwent the ease of leaning forward against Maitland’s bony hands. When Egan came up she had left to go and prop herself against one of her neighbours’ fences.
She said, ‘What have I been doing, Maurice?’
‘Don’t worry. James was going to take you inside. But I think I should now.’
Both the girl and, to his own mystification, Maitland protested.
Egan allowed himself to see reason. ‘It isn’t that I don’t want to face her,’ he said. ‘But she can be so nasty – to you, I mean.’
‘I’m not a prize tenant. I’ll let myself in. What a dirty mess I’m in!’
She yelped and began to cry and search for a handkerchief. Her rifled handbag hung gaping on her left elbow. Maitland watched her for some seconds before remembering his own vast institutional handkerchief and pressing it on her.
‘James your name is?’ she asked in a stifled voice.
‘Yes.’
‘You go back to the car, Maurice. And you, James, you just help me to the door. Maurice, you know that I have a long and close experience of shame, don’t you? I mean the court and all the rest of it. I have a long experience of shame, don’t I?’
The ovoid blue moon of Egan’s face nodded. ‘Yes. It seems to be the woman’s lot in these matters. I wish it wasn’t, Nora.’
‘Well, I’ve never been more ashamed than I am now. You must forgive me …’
Egan answered gently. ‘What I sometimes think is that you must forgive us.’ His white priest’s hand included Maitland in the guilt.
She began to walk away saying, ‘No, no, I can’t have that.’
Maitland turned Egan, who seemed dazed, back to the car and then followed the woman, getting to her side in time to open the gate. Red-tiled steps climbed the two terraces of her sister’s garden; and once Maitland had pushed her up them, what looked like a lion but was probably a golden labrador burst on them from the blind side of wisterias.
‘Sit down, Brian,’ Nora told it sadly, in tone that accused it of insincere ferocity. ‘I’m so tired.’
In a way that was still drunken, she s
earched for her key over her left elbow into her handbag. The porch light flashed on and discovered her at it. Then the front door opened and the fly-screen flew wide. A woman dark, bitter and tall stood inviting explanations. She was, in terms of form and composition, a vulnerable figure. Her long hair had been combed out into ropes, and this and a short quilted house-coat above thin legs and feathery slippers made her look top-heavy. Also, she carried in one dark hand a cheap novel whose cover showed a young man with paramount shoulders receding from a thin, badly-used girl. None the less, her effect on Maitland was Medusan. She too gave the impression of having been badly used, but by somebody who had not misused her with impunity.
‘All afternoon and all night, Nora,’ she said, ‘and not even a phone call. Where have you been?’
Nora held her hands out, swayed and shook her head. Her handbag fell with a thud.
‘Excuse me,’ Maitland felt bound to say with however full a knowledge of his ineptitude. ‘My name’s James. I’ve met Nora casually in the past and when I saw in this state – so sick – I felt …’
‘Mr James,’ the woman said heavily, Maitland letting what seemed a happy mistake stand. ‘I’ll get your address before you go.’
He blushed within his dubious combination of clothes. His one reasonable impulse was to bolt for the sake of discretion, leap down both terraces, vault the fence and hope that Egan was fast on the ignition. ‘Perhaps,’ he said simply.
‘No one is going to bring my sister home half-covered with sick and get away without explaining himself. Come inside, Nora.’
As Nora obeyed, Maitland swept up her bag and pressed it into her hands. She began to move – not at all pretty by the porch light. Her stockings hung so baggily on her legs that she seemed to have wasted since pulling them on earlier in the day. She smelt badly, and her clothes were draggled and soiled. All this she knew and was willing to be ashamed at anyone’s beck, especially her sister’s.