‘There’s a priest here who never speaks,’ Egan boasted. ‘Never. Not for months. And they can’t let him say Mass because he’s liable to fling something, even the chalice, at his altar-server. It’s happened.’
The small priest, sedated to a level where he could rejoice even in chalice-hurling, chattered on as he and Maitland emerged on a veranda of red tiles with an inlaid Celtic snake swallowing his tail in the porch. It was impossible to believe in the serpent’s elegant distress, but the grounds crawled with credibly morose patients.
Egan chattered on. ‘Well, my second day here, I woke for an hour or two, and I saw this priest in the ward and asked him how he was. He glared at me as if I’d called him a foul name, and then they gave me some more drugs and I slept for three days or so.’
They sat on a garden seat, Maitland remembering just in time to remove a new paperback from his hip pocket. Before them was a conservatory, and beyond it orange orchards ran downhill to mudflats possessed by grazing cows. The river ran quietly, but flicked its thighs in the sun to cross a sandbank.
‘When I woke, the priest was beside me. I thought that he’d been there all the time, while I slept, but that wasn’t possible. Anyhow, he looked at me, full of hate. I thought he might murder me. All he said was, “Mind your own bloody business!” Imagine!’ Egan giggled. ‘It isn’t funny, of course, but the man in the bed next to mine told me that the poor fellow had visited me each morning while I was drugged and waited for me to wake up, and when I didn’t, said, “Mind your own bloody business!” with plenty of venom, and then marched away.’ In the same hard-pressed breath, he asked, ‘How are things with you, James?’
‘Very well. I’m boarding in a friary, theoretically under supervision, but the friars are better sports than Nolan. I have a good monastic breakfast, spend no less than five hours a day in the archives at the public library, chant the evening office with the community. I sleep like a just man.’ After thought, he admitted, ‘I miss the Mass. I miss it very acutely. It’s a surprise.’
How deep a one he didn’t say; but the rite he had learnt at twenty-two out of a yellow book, with a chalice made of half a jam-tin, he fretted for now with a trenchancy he had thought himself beyond.
He said, ‘It’s a matter of what you’ve been bred to.’
‘I suppose if my mad letter had succeeded, I’d have missed the Mass, too.’
Maitland’s eyes slewed away towards the blue distances of the river, but he said in the end, ‘You’re sure to have, Maurice.’
Egan wept feverishly, like an unhappy drunk. Maitland ignored him.
‘Listen, Maurice, I’ve taken a cottage at a little beach town along the coast for the last month of my suspension. Some of the paperback royalties on my infamous book will pay for the rent. It isn’t a very luxurious place. Outside toilets. Cans.’
‘Well, they were good enough for Duns Scotus and Aquinas and Peter Abelard,’ Egan said, rubbing his eyes.
‘So they were,’ Maitland said. ‘I was wondering, would you like to come with me? You can see the beach from the cottage and there’s a whopping cone-shaped headland. We can run over it every morning. Like a couple of Legion of Mary boys trying to sublimate our lower urges.’
Egan chuckled and kept shedding tears, though happily.
‘Then we’ll go for a swim and have lunch. Then you can have a rest and I’ll work on my new book …’
‘New book?’ Egan asked like the old Egan, the defensor vinculi.
‘It’s a novel. But there’s little chance of its being published. Not while His Grace rules.’
‘They’re going to make bishops retire in their seventies. So I won’t have you saying there’s no hope.’
‘How old is His Grace?’
‘Sixty-one.’ For the first time since infancy, on the face of things and before another human, Egan, fallen cherub, leered. ‘Coronary age,’ he hissed.
They took the cottage. Each morning Maitland bullied Egan across the conical headland and taught him to catch small fish in the surf. Tired himself, he worked four hours each afternoon and wrote up to fifteen hundred words on most days. Egan napped and read, waking to find Maitland half-satisfied at dusk with his day’s work.
‘How’s the conscienceless man?’ Egan would ask, for Maitland’s novel was the record of an obscure Edwardian who had entirely lacked moral imagination.
While the novelist said his office, Egan made the evening meal. At the town pub, they had the snooker table booked for a quarter past eight every night, and if no one had booked it for nine they would play on till closing-time – Egan squinting toutishly at hard lies and letting his beer go flat on the mantelpiece. Every first morning, he slept until nine because of the pills. Every second morning, they drove in his car to the main town, and he said a Mass which Maitland served. The ceremony had its poignancies for both of them; but neither gave a hint, except that, climbing back into the car one day, Egan said, ‘You say your office and I say Mass every second morning. Between us, we are nearly one whole priest.’
They were sent a few letters. The graduate society for whom he had said Mass on a headland one autumn Saturday wrote to Maitland and asked if he would say Mass for them in three weeks’ time, the very day he would be given his faculties back by the archbishop. He replied pleasantly, accepting.
There was a letter from his publisher with a cheque for the American edition of The Meanings of God. Since the contract had been signed ten months previously, Maitland had no choice but to accept the money. That night they drank liqueurs over their snooker.
What did the most damage was the letters from the chancery.
‘I didn’t know you two gentlemen were doctors,’ the lady at the post-office told Maitland. ‘It’s handy to have a doctor here. A girl who was mauled by a shark here three years back had to be taken thirteen miles to the doctor.’
‘Oh, but we’re doctors of minerology,’ Maitland said.
Egan had already gone outside and opened the formal envelope in the shade of the telephone booth, as if it must be kept secret from the few strolling housewives. As Maitland came up, the old pallor returned to Egan, who handed the letter across rather than speak of it. So Maitland read it before reading his own. It consigned Egan to an industrial parish and said that the work load was light there. Maitland imagined the little man among the factories: the schoolboy face and the prim body and the set diction. He clicked his tongue but could not afford to be angry, for Egan’s sake. Instead he dealt with his own letter truculently, read it quickly, and rammed it into the pocket of his shorts. He was to go as a curate to a parish in the mountains. His lot was sleet and sodalities. He told Egan.
‘They say that the parish system is dead, a relic in an age of technology,’ he said. ‘Let’s be two jolly maggots.’
They dawdled home. For Egan, reality had drained out of the conical mountain, the sea and the fish in the sea. He dreaded the iron realities of a priesthood which three out of four men did not believe in, but which he could not forbear believing in. He was the unwise virgin of the modern advertisement, bound to the use of the non-majority soap.
‘I suppose we could arrange to take this cottage again next year,’ he proposed, and the small mouth set when Maitland said yes. But it did little good.
On a Saturday, Maitland was received by His Grace. That same evening he said Mass on a cliff-top above a flooded valley. Mist nudged the ragged plateau across the gorge, and a wind made his chasuble fly. Somebody again placed a truck to the weather side of the altar. Maitland, unsure for the moment, did not preach.
Thomas Keneally, Three Cheers for the Paraclete
(Series: # )
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