Close to midnight, a taxi took them to the side door of a grotesque stone bulk growing from the earth as emphatically as a cathedral. Maitland had a key and let his cousins into this cavernous symbol of his unhappiness. It went by the name of St Peter’s House of Studies. Here Maitland had studied years before, and now that he had returned to teach, he caught constant echoes of the years of his first immurement. These gave new proportions to the fatuous, funeral-hall look of the corridors by night. Brendan and Grete, failing to see through the fatuity, were impressed. They would have laughed to see the staircase, its one bulb throwing a fuzz of luminosity down the wall, in a Boris Karloff film. But this was a priestly, solemn, celibate place; so they did not laugh now. Maitland led them upstairs, turning to see Brendan unwontedly timid for a best-selling poet and Grete, still in her scarf, as terrified as any pneumatic refugee in a Hollywood blood-and-luster. Upstairs another dim light, in a swan’s-neck fitting from the days of gas, hinted the way down two corridors.
Maitland led them to his room and pushed open the cedar door barbarized with bulk varnish. ‘Welcome to Mon Repos,’ he said. ‘Here is my ante-room and through here is my – rather, your bedroom.’
The room was untidy and furnished with historical biography and memoirs. In the corner stood a three-quarter bed embattled among the gossip of the dead.
‘Beyond that door is the balcony and over here is the wash-basin.’ He found them a clean towel. ‘Please don’t be overawed by the house. It’s just flatly horrible by daylight. You’ll be quite safe.’
Brendan followed him to the door, out of Grete’s hearing. ‘We’re more grateful than we can hope to tell you.’
‘It’s not the Ritz,’ said Maitland. ‘If you can be comfortable on that sofa of mine that’s redolent of old prelates, you’re welcome, Good night.’
Outside, the light was out, meaning that the president was in and would have to be approached. Maitland first carried what he had in his hands, his breviary and the old shorts and beach shirt which did him for pyjamas, to the infirmary. Here Hurst, a nervous student perpetually brought down with boils, viruses and impetigo, wrestled angels in his sleep and snuffled at the job. Maitland dropped his goods on a bed and found blankets among old books in a cupboard. They smelt of mould, but Maitland cared too little about that sort of thing. Besides, he felt nervous of waking Hurst.
After a little time, he went to Dr Nolan’s office at the bottom of a windowless anabranch to the main corridor. The president could be seen through the partly open door, extending one foot at a time towards his radiator and listening to his expansive deputy, Dr Costello. Maitland knocked. As he went in he was watched by Costello with an irony that seemed mainly to emit from the rimless crystals the man wore on his nose, and to be therefore mainly the fault of an optometrist.
‘Like your blonde,’ Costello said. He was a princely man, even when in cardigan, black trousers and slippers (which shone like dancing pumps), even when holding a towel and a little bag of toiletries.
Maitland sighed and hit his forehead. ‘You haven’t found them?’
‘Sit down, James,’ Monsignor Nolan said. The president himself was seated, still in a long overcoat. In so many ways, he and his house were kindred. His conversation had a dated air that proved contagious, Nolan reducing both parties in any interview to a heavy idiom which Maitland thought of as Edwardian. In his overcoat, which was also on Edwardian lines, he looked very like a parson in a Punch cartoon. Across the saddle of his half-bald head he had six long hairs combed straight, and parallel from temple to temple, in what had once been, perhaps, the priestly equivalent of waxed moustaches. ‘Sit down,’ he repeated, a little too much like one of Lord Lundy’s uncles.
Costello began to chat.
‘I’ve just now met your cousins in the corridor. Charmers they are, but a bit of a shock when seen by one of those forty-watt globes economy forces on us. Anyhow, it turned out you’d forgotten to show them where the washroom was.’
Seated, Maitland swatted the arm of his chair. He’d forgotten that they might need toilets. He’d thought that, once installed, Brendan and Grete would remain a secret Dr Nolan could be admitted into at everyone’s leisure. Yet Costello had found two strangers so well entrenched as to be seeking a bathroom, and this before Maitland had even approached the president’s office.
As Maitland explained himself now, he was disturbed at how pained Nolan seemed. Something less shallow than a sense of slight made the man’s stubble-grey cheeks typify, of all things, bereavement.
‘I wish you had asked me first, James,’ Nolan said; and Maitland found himself abject enough to suggest, ‘They’re both absolutely respectable Catholics.’
‘Where do you intend to spend the night?’ Costello asked, as if he’d isolated the very point at which the project touched absurdity.
‘I’ve set myself up in a corner of the infirmary.’
‘Good God. Who would have thought of the infirmary?’ Not Costello, for one. ‘You’ll catch a neurosis from Hurst.’
Yet, from Monsignor Nolan’s general air of deflation, one would have thought neuroses were nearer to hand than that.
‘I didn’t think I could let them spend the night in a warehouse doorway,’ Maitland explained again. He hoped that the warehouse doorway, with its overtones of the thirties, might penetrate the old man’s imagination. ‘They had no money, neither did I. I felt I could either offer them my room for one night or stay there with them till morning.’
‘You’re a rare one,’ Costello amiably took it as his right to say. ‘You spend half the night buggarizing around a headland and crawling round the slums, and then forget to tell your cousins where the toilets are. Isn’t your own bladder subject to the strong east wind?’
In view of Nolan’s sustained air of tragedy, it was not a question that warranted answering.
‘Perhaps it would be best if I went and joined Hurst.’
‘I’d be grateful if you stayed a second,’ Nolan said.
Costello yawned. ‘Well. Back to the washbowl.’ He was listed to preach at the cathedral the next day; he was a popular preacher with a standard to maintain and, like a surgeon or bomber pilot, needed his sleep.
When he had gone out, the monsignor said, ‘I’d have preferred you hadn’t brought them, James.’ His eyes moped across a letter fixed waist-deep in his typewriter. Maitland could see a Latin sentence beginning, ‘Therefore, Most Holy Father, I humbly crave …’ What? Some liturgical privilege? A new dogma? A statement on contraception? Or the ‘I’ might be a nun or brother wanting to be dispensed from vows; needing Nolan to frame a petition in that involuted Latin which atones partially for the defection of woman or man.
‘They travelled all last night?’ he wanted to know.
‘Yes.’
The old man breathed resignedly, his sinuses grating. He appeared to have been done irremediable damage. He blamed no one. But he was remotely angry with Maitland.
‘You know James, I don’t even let my sisters stay in this house, though they’re both widows. I have them stay up the hill at the convent.’
‘I can understand your feeling insulted,’ Maitland assured him.
‘Can you understand my sorrow?’ Nolan said, and smiled in pain.
‘To be honest, I find it hard …’
‘Can you understand you have introduced something new into this place?’ Nolan played with the roller of his typewriter so that whoever’s humble petition it was trembled and bowed.
‘But worse than new. Alien.’
Maitland came too close to smiling.
Nolan went on. ‘This has been a celibate house since its foundations were laid. That is a matter of eighty years.’
‘Monsignor, aren’t you overestimating the importance …?’
But beneath the clerical scalp conviction was impregnable. ‘I think that given the fact that they travelled throughout last night, and given their youth and various other condign circumstances, then we must make certain assump
tions, James.’
Maitland squinted at the sad, pale eyes.
‘Monsignor, we’re not Hebrews. There isn’t any ritual uncleanness involved, no matter what assumptions we make.’
‘You will see to it that your sheets are changed tomorrow, won’t you, James?’
Without thinking, Maitland stood up. ‘I’m sorry you feel this way, Monsignor, because it’s so unnecessary. I have broken the laws of good manners, but I haven’t broken any mystical rules of house purity. If I have, I’m willing to take any consequences on myself.’
Nolan said bleakly, ‘You haven’t lived here as long as I have.’
‘I would be more concerned about real matters if I had. Hurst, for example.’
‘There have always been sick young men here. It’s the will of God.’
‘So is – so are other things.’
Without any warning the monsignor lost his temper and typed a violent line of the petition. ‘Alii situs, alia licita,’ he told Maitland and frenetically planted a colon on the sheet. ‘In other words, there’s a time and place for everything, Dr Maitland.’
The young priest had no answer, so said good night. As he left, Nolan called behind him, ‘The sheets, Dr Maitland, don’t forget.’
Maitland lay distracted by the old man’s celibate pride for about an hour. During the hour his aim was contemplation. But he frequently heard Hurst, and beyond Hurst’s bed the long frosted windows now held a glacial and insomniac moonlight.
Tonight and every night, as he futilely attempted mysticism, he dreamt that God had been reduced to a luminous surgical trolley on which he lay with his feet in cold blood, his own. His bloody hocks and bare shoulder-blades embraced the canvas cover of ultimate reality with a dreadful fervour, making so strong an affirmation and subjection that he writhed. He thought that this dream was merely a gauge of his fears on departing from the traditional God in whom he had been raised, the lee-shore, safe-as-Lloyds God he could no longer believe in. So he suffered the cold of the trolley with some detachment, knowing that men who are in transition between gods must expect unquiet rest.
He woke when Hurst said, ‘Unbelievable as it may seem, I find it hard sometimes not to run wild at table.’
He found that he needed another blanket, he would cough for days if he didn’t get one, but an etiquette of souls made him wait to be sure that Hurst had nothing more to say. In the end he slid from the high bed and found the cupboard. The cold fust of old books assailed him in the dark; devotional books, Dublin 1913, a good year for unalloyed faith. Why couldn’t he have been alive and priested then? Saving up indulgences, averting tumours of the throat with a St Blaise candle, uttering arcane litanies; going off to the holocaust the following year to be outraged at the intemperate use of the Holy Name by the men in the trenches; dying in 1924 of dropsy, rosaries, and the certainty of Paradise.
Maitland hunted then, among the devotional excesses of some of the Irish Catholic Truth Society’s most popular writers, for a blanket, and found one reeking like a brewery from mould. As he arranged it on the bed Hurst said a second time but more emphatically, ‘I know it sounds mad. But sometimes I find it hard not to run wild at table.’
‘It embarrasses me to confess this,’ Hurst had confessed to Dr Costello a week earlier, ‘but sometimes I find it hard not to run wild at table. A bread-and-butter knife can put me into a sweat and it’s impossible to eat.’
This was on a close night in Costello’s bedroom study, and one of the vast windows stood four or five feet open. Beyond it some crickets could be heard mourning the cooling season. Costello wore languorously his black cardigan, a purple confessional stole and a pursed-mouthed brand of sympathy.
‘It’s so ridiculous, but I dread meal-times. A bread-knife is the worst. It ties my soul in knots, it really does. As soon as anybody begins to cut bread …’ The crucial word cut put the slight young man’s teeth on edge. ‘It always seems to me I’m only a hair’s-breadth away from grabbing the knife and doing the worst I can.’
Costello smiled at this so patently gentle boy, at the unlikely temptation. Hurst did not see the smile; his bent head continued to wag and agonize. He kept his mind’s vigilant eye on the child-braining, man-gutting barbarian who dwelt in his belly.
‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘how I haven’t consented, in the mind, to mutilating other people. How guilty am I? What am I bound to do about it? Am I mad? Do you think I should surrender myself to an institution? I simply don’t know any of the answers.’
He knelt still, though the fingers of his right hand raked a skin blemish on his chin. He did not open his eyes, but could feel Costello’s placid aura. Behind Costello, on the desk, as everyone knew, were the proofs of the man’s Praelectiones de Codice Legis Canonicae, the codified certainties of his life of study, soon to be published in Rome. On the wall stood Costello’s crucifix, below it Costello’s white tumulus of a bed.
These things Hurst apprehended even with closed eyes, and envied as sources of plenitude, as if the priest had charged them with his own tranquil success.
Costello said in the end, ‘You are in no way guilty. That much is certain, my son, in no way guilty.’
And if that sounded theatrical, Costello was not disquieted, for the sacrament itself had dramatic quality, and he had given and received it innumerable times. Neither did he rush. He breathed amply, having been taught by an elocutionist at three dollars a lesson the use of the breath as weapon of reassurance or censure.
‘It isn’t a general sort of violence, is it, that you intend towards people? You don’t simply want to put the knife anywhere? It always has to do with this one … area.’
‘Yes,’ Hurst admitted.
‘And you don’t have anyone in particular in mind when this compulsion strikes you? I mean, you feel you’d willingly attack anyone at hand, friend or enemy, anyone at all?’
Hurst covered his closed eyes with a hand. ‘I have no enemies. Anyone at all.’
Costello stared at him through the glinting sanity of those rimless glasses. ‘Let me tell you, these movements of violence, these compulsions, everyone suffers from them. We are not long out of the forest, really. What? Two thousand years? Less, in many cases. Some European races were barbarians until eight hundred years ago. And eight hundred years is no time, no time, a relative instant. So there is that part of us that wants to return to … well, to the forests where it was happy under the law of blood. These compulsions of which you speak, they’re no more than an indigestion of the spirit and aren’t to be taken seriously. Now you have taken yours too seriously, you have been too easily shocked. For your soul’s sake you must not be too easily shocked in future. Put your trust …’
He listed a number of supernatural agencies.
‘Relax too,’ he said, and exhaled. ‘Panic is what kills. Consciously control the breathing, which is a gauge and determinant of normality.’
In some crumbly fox-hole beneath his skull Hurst shuddered and called, ‘Christ, my Christ!’, and his breath slopped in and out.
In the meantime Costello squinted out of the windows at the darkness plangent with insects.
‘Do you think I need to see a doctor?’ Hurst asked.
‘I don’t really think so. Faith is what ultimately cures. The doctors themselves will tell you that. And faith is merely a highly informed form of relaxing. Put it thus.’ Costello drew himself up in his chair and extended both hands, clenched to represent that both horns of the young man’s agony were in fact padded.
‘Either you will succumb to this compulsion or you won’t. If you succumb, you will be no way guilty, because you’ll have gone mad – an impossible contingency: even you can see that. If you don’t succumb, then the compulsion is what statesmen call a paper tiger, and the question arises then: Why in the hell all this anguish?’
‘I see,’ Hurst said, opening his eyes, but there was so much doubt ingrained in the corners of his mouth.
‘Now these psychiatrists are not altogether
reliable. They have a smattering of theology and tend to pontificate. In the end, all they can do for you is give you sleeping-pills, and I have some of my own here that I’ll give you in any case.’
Hurst said, ‘Thank you, father’. But he had hoped he was sick enough to need a battery of doctors, for if he wasn’t, then this was normality, and if this was normality, he wanted to die.
Then Costello questioned him about the origins of his compulsion.
‘It is all part of the same –’ Hurst’s open hands considered such words as demon and torment, but he did not, before this priest breathing so episcopally, have the courage of his own bitterness – ‘thing.’ He explained how he had begun by feeling liable, in God’s terrible eye, for all the corner-cutting, jay-walking, bus-hanging and variously endangered humans of that city. He had once pulled the emergency chain on a ferry because children were running around the decks. Not that he thought of their lungs bursting fathoms down in the bay. But he was convinced that he was liable with unlimited liability. Under God.
‘Scruples,’ Costello said perfunctorily. ‘Some of Europe’s greatest souls have suffered in this way.’
Hurst raised frightened eyes to the priest. They slewed away like gulls at the sight of the white coverlet. An expanse of white could provoke the barbarian as an expanse of canvas provoked the artist. ‘Then the foulest blasphemies began to rise in my mind,’ he went on. ‘Chapel became a long battle to keep the lid on these ideas. The – thing always picked what I feared most and played on it. It used my eyes and my soul to choose what it would torment me with next. If it had been a Communist interrogator, it could not have –’
‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ Costello told him. ‘The thing is you. Well, there’s every good chance that it’s you. I sometimes think that the battle with oneself is harder than the battle with any prince of darkness. None the less, there’s never any excuse for hysteria.’
Hurst gave up, covered his eyes again. His complexion was streaky white and remote from the ruddy mania that absorbed him.