Three Cheers For The Paraclete Read online

  He could not finish questioning their credentials. A woman in a little British car was confronting Costello to the left and flourishing her raffia-slippered foot at the brake. The foot skidded out of the slipper, flush onto the accelerator.

  Mrs Lamotte squealed on Maitland’s left, but Maitland and the combative Mrs Clark did not see the impact. They were aware only of the sedan, unaccountably full of grey air, rising sideways and turning over.

  Maitland forgot the ladies as ladies. He remembered and could feel, all the same, that he was closeted somehow and that it was unspeakable to be so closeted; while the car came down on its roof and the widows’ handbags split like gourds either side of his head. Both his hands warded off the crumpling roof. The car continued to bounce and the roof to buckle. A compact flew before his eyes, spilling powder across the roof. He had time for contrition, but it would have been a futile formality – like filling out customs papers when you know you are carrying contraband and know that they know it. So he gave up all his time to terror. At last the roof struck him on the head.

  He woke in quiet, seconds later or hours. They all sat inverted and in perfect order and silence. Dr Costello still had the wheel by one hand. Nolan leant towards him on the verge of advising. Nothing was said. Around their heads were strewn breviaries, saccharine bottles, lipstick cartridges. A capsule of hair-dye near Maitland was marked Tahitian Amber, and Maitland could see it even though his vision broke continuously into yellow clefts. Beside him, Mrs Lamotte’s exposed suspenders and unhusbanded white flank seemed unconscionably sad.

  ‘Do you think we should try to get out?’ Maitland asked the lady.

  Costello told them all, ‘We had the right of way.’

  The engine was silent. Beyond Mrs Lamotte, Maitland could see sunlight and bitumen.

  ‘Do you think we should get out, Mrs Lamotte?’

  The lady pulled her skirts up around her knees, coughed and jiggled the handle.

  ‘It’s stuck,’ she told him. She had all the lassitude of a survivor, and felt through the squashed and diminished window, the air on her face.

  Outside, somebody began to haul at the doors. Maitland further found that he was impinging on Mrs Clark’s lap. He moved away, as it seemed to him, into a cold sweat and an area of nausea.

  ‘Put that cigarette out!’ Costello was roaring out of his window at someone coming to his rescue. Using both hands on the roof, he turned his large shoulders towards the back seat.

  ‘All well? Ladies? James?’

  ‘Dr Maitland’s head is gashed,’ Mrs Clark said, though her own hands were bleeding.

  ‘So it is.’ Costello took a more strenuous look. ‘Nasty, James. Bloody woman from the left.’

  Maitland put his hand on his scalp and found the short, reddish hair sticky with blood.

  ‘I’m going to be sick, Mrs Lamotte,’ he said by way of edging past her earth-mother bosom and out of the window on his belly. He had just had the supreme emotion of his life. The years he had put in and the meals he had been fed to prepare him for the sublime, and when the sublime came, it was not the vision of truth, it was a sublime fright. Soon he would be ashamed beyond words. At that moment, what most actively occurred to him was that Costello used hordes of students to give the car a bi-weekly clean and would not readily forgive a man who sicked up in its back seat.

  In the sunlight, people took him by the arms, talked about luck and providence, invited him to take lottery tickets with them. They put him on a fence outside flats and wrapped his head in a towel.

  It seemed to be immediately that an old lady served tea and gem-scones to all the victims and to some mere bystanders as well. He saw Costello actually accepting a cup and chewing a scone as he chatted with a constable. Farther along the fence, the woman in raffia slippers, so narrowly saved from being a mighty slayer of priests, would not be comforted by police or beverages.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she yelled across the crowd whenever she sighted one of Costello’s party. ‘I’m sorry,’ she called down the fence to Maitland.

  At one stage he was sick.

  When he felt better, there were the three Nolans standing around him, all with blood-tacky hands, the monsignor’s cheek grained with blood. These were people he had forgotten. Their concern put him to shame. An ambulance came, and Mrs Lamotte collapsed. Knowing that she had become dizzy on her way to ask him how he was, Maitland knelt by her and made a bad attempt to find her pulse among the yellow, speckled clouds of his own concussion. All the time, a blue beach towel remained on his head. He could smell its cool, well-laundered cupboard smell. It was very likely, he thought, that that smell was Europe’s or any one’s prime contribution to civilization, since all other contributions – law, religion, literature – had so often become such bad jokes. An ambulance man came and took Mrs Lamotte’s wrist from him.

  It seemed to him then that they descended into that demimonde which is the back compartment of an ambulance. He sat on one stretcher berth; Mrs Lamotte lay prostrate on the other. At this stage there was a swab on his head and antiseptic savaged the edges of the wound. Through the open doors he could still see Costello’s sedan on its hood in petrol and glass. What a burnt offering it would have been had he and the Nolan girls burnt together without room to writhe – fat to fat, bone to bone, ash to ash. Unholy priest and holy widows wed in one excess of flame. The poisonous thought went through his system with that false methylated coolness peculiar to fevers. He stared at the sedative, smoked windows. Outside, Monsignor Nolan convinced Mrs Clark that she should travel in the front with the driver. Costello raucously swapped addresses and insurance companies with the raffia-slippered woman and was trailed to the very doors by her.

  ‘… absolutely nobody’s fault. I’d be most angry to know that you blamed yourself. No special crime in running into us. We’re just blood and gristle like other people.’ In fact, he carried a gob of blood in the tip of his left ear. ‘After all, we’re supposed to be ready to go. Understand?’

  She would have understood the Trinity had he asked her to. Her husband was also there, hanging onto her elbow and full of a baffled pugnacity.

  Costello and the attendant mounted to the ambulance. He said, ‘James, your poor head. Mind if I sit here?’

  The doors were closed.

  ‘Isn’t that woman coming to the hospital?’ Maitland asked.

  ‘Stupid bitch. She’s going by taxi. All this black cloth would make her hysterical or something.’

  Costello raised his voice to a picnic-bus level and asked of the population of the ambulance, ‘Who remembered to give absolution while we were all sitting there upside down?’

  Nolan said pitifully, ‘I tried to give one as we rolled over.’ He shuddered and sucked his blue lips. ‘But everything was so incoherent.’

  ‘Never mind. I got you all with a general and conditional absolution just after we landed. And no doubt James here did something similar.’

  But Maitland’s priesthood had never been as reflex to him as that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Good God, that means you would all have died shriven except me. You’d all have been absolved except me, the absolver. In our next disaster you can all go hang.’

  Nolan, Mrs Lamotte, even the attendant, all laughed dutifully. Outside, the city was going home in its first two gears and the simper of brakes. No doubt there were cursing and impasses at traffic lights. But in that capsule of satin glass it all sounded homogeneous and very sweet, and sharpened one’s sense of having survived.

  Monsignor Nolan became ardent without warning, saying, ‘We could all have died. At least some of the doors should have flown open and thrown us on the pavement. The petrol could have ignited. I am convinced of a divine intervention.’

  Even concussed, Maitland blushed for the attendant.

  ‘Of how direct a nature?’ Costello asked.

  ‘Of as direct a nature as is needed to keep four doors shut when some at least should have opened. As direct as is ne
eded to bring us safe out of such wreckage.’

  ‘Our old mother was looking over us,’ Mrs Lamotte told Nolan. But he frowned: ancestor-worship was not among his crimes. He was a strict theologian, and he knew that Aquinas cast doubt on the idea that the departed have any knowledge of our affairs.

  ‘It was almost like a parable,’ said Nolan. He laid his chin for some seconds on his purple stock, while Maitland sat pressing his fists into his cheeks, trying to soothe the scalp from a distance; Mrs Lamotte rested; the attendant was an outsider. Only Costello was capable of presiding and looked chairmanly.

  ‘It happened because James was with us,’ Nolan proclaimed, unspeakably certain.

  Given Costello’s off-hand driving, Maitland blinked.

  Costello laughed. ‘I’ll tell the insurance company.’

  ‘It is exactly like the Jonah story,’ the monsignor told them all, beginning again to shudder. ‘The point is, James, that a Jonah has ultimately more chance of life and a sublime destiny than the rest of us. That is why he is always a source of storm, because he is in flight from God, he is a fugitive. As you are, James.’

  ‘Quieten him down,’ Maitland told Costello bluntly.

  ‘It is exactly as if the traffic cast him off in the same way that the ship’s crew cast Jonah off,’ Nolan said to the others. ‘The organ where he has been hurt is very significant.’

  ‘It’s hard to agree altogether,’ said Costello.

  The president raised his head and extended his cock-robin ecclesiastical breast towards Maitland. ‘James, I shall not rest until I have done what can be done to make you the priest you should be.’

  ‘I think you have had a bad shock,’ Maitland was able to say.

  ‘You have been saved to serve, James. Your head has been gashed and bled to signify that up to the moment you have been headstrong and in contempt of authority –’

  ‘To signify that Dr Costello,’ Maitland insisted, ‘was driving too fast. To signify that I was so crushed in the back that I was closer to the roof than the rest of you to begin with –’

  ‘Calm down,’ Costello said.

  Nolan stood up, crouched but anxious for dominance. ‘The archbishop will descend like a hawk on all those who do not enforce the traditional –’

  But Maitland was continuing, his head whirring so hard he had to shout to surmount it.

  ‘– to signify that I had work to do this afternoon and that when I want to be taken to an exemplary death I’ll ask to be and that –’

  ‘Don’t worry, James,’ Nolan promised him. ‘We’ll forgive you whenever you wish to make your apologies.’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Costello said in extenuation.

  Monsignor Nolan nodded like a judge in a dream.

  Half an hour later, when he lay half-etherized in a hospital cubicle, they forgave him without apologies, as he forgave Nolan. Costello said, ‘It was all the result of shock,’ and all parties voted for the proposition.

  4

  ONE NIGHT EARLY in the following week a plump-hipped, sandy-haired priest visited Maitland. This was Dr Egan, Nolan’s assistant in the teaching of moral theology, defensor vinculi – defender of the bond – in the archbishop’s marriage court. A capeless student soutane gave him a defined, self-contained look that matched what Maitland took to be his impregnability.

  The dumpling figure moved fastidiously through the province of dust that was Maitland’s ante-room and book depot. The bedroom-study had disarranged itself that night with particular malice.

  ‘First time I’ve been visited by a defensor vinculi,’ said Maitland. ‘In fact, first time I’ve been visited by anyone on the staff. Except Costello and Nolan. And I suppose it’s their duty.’

  ‘Well, it is time we got to know each other,’ Egan asserted. He, like Costello, had been to an elocution teacher, but it had done him more permanent harm.

  ‘I thought I mustn’t be using the right soap or something.’ Maitland’s eyes sought the second chair, finding it by the wash-basin. He removed some suds-stained memoirs from it and placed it for Egan. ‘I suppose you’ve all been very busy.’

  ‘It’s been a very busy season in the marriage courts. Mainly –’ Egan swallowed – ‘mainly impotency cases. An interesting Petrine privilege case, too. That has to go to Rome, of course, but Costello and I have to do all the spade-work. And my job is to make sure that the court takes as much time as possible. I’m the nigger in the woodheap.’ He chuckled like an insurance man. He must often have used this piece of whimsy on star-crossed spouses who wanted their marriages annulled. ‘In any case, we’re very busy.’

  ‘Fascinating stuff, canon law. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of mine.’ Picking the defensor for a teetotaller, Maitland said, ‘Like some whisky, doctor?’

  ‘No thank you, doctor.’

  The little priest looked as if he knew he’d be given the drink in a glass streaked with toothpaste. This Maitland was very glad to decide. ‘James,’ he insisted.

  ‘James. It’s very kind of you, but I’m a teetotaller.’

  ‘I would never have picked you for one.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you, doctor? James, I mean. Please feel free …’

  ‘You’re sure you won’t?’

  Egan was. On his knees, Maitland enjoyed hunting down some White Horse under the bed.

  Egan continued, ‘People get so resentful about our work. You know, one night a gentleman whose plea failed tried to assault me.’

  Maitland, finding the bottle, groaned.

  ‘Make unto yourself friends of the mammon of iniquity,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Egan agreed, thinking that Maitland was approving whisky with a text.

  ‘No, I don’t mean me. I have already more than fulfilled that glorious old saying. I meant the marriage court. From what I can remember of canon law, the court moves in gentle channels. I was thinking that if you employed a detective agency you’d soon scotch half these pleas for annulment on the grounds of impotency. I don’t suppose His Grace ever considered it.’

  Egan became very still. ‘I don’t think anybody has ever been temerarious enough to suggest it.’

  Temerarious, thought Maitland. It was an adjective worthy of conversation in a home for retired civil servants.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think there’s a great future for some temerarious cleric. It would be no different from employing professional fund-raisers. Private eyes are often used by jealous mothers, and I don’t think Mother Church should be outjealoused by any fleshly momma.’

  Concluding at the sink, he let a drizzle of water into the whisky. ‘Well,’ he called as he turned, ‘here’s to Dr Egan. May he prove defensor of a successful quorum of vinculorum.’

  Allegory of the mystic courting the divine fires, a brown moth fried itself against the ceiling light. Light fell on the defensor’s dark hair kept counting-house sober with coconut oil. Tomorrow’s beard showed faint purple under the white cheeks but had no future in such a neat little man.

  Egan said painfully, ‘Are you trying to make fun of me, doctor?’

  Maitland threw his untasted whisky down the sink.

  ‘I’ve been here for two months and have received no more than a hullo from anybody.’

  ‘Perhaps no one has received more than a hullo from you.’

  ‘It’s not my place to make the move. I’m the outsider. I’m doubly the outsider because I’ve had too much freedom in Europe and freedom is dangerous in my case and I’m here for some form of rehabilitation. I don’t want to force myself on any of you if I’m likely to become an embarrassment to you. But two months is a long time for two priests in the same house to be merely nodding acquaintances.’

  ‘As I explained, I’ve been very busy,’ the blue-white jaws enunciated.

  ‘I believe that if you meant to speak to me you would have. I’m sure that if I went to your room I would find all your books under proper regimen, a year’s lecture notes in your drawer, a razor in your cabinet that a surgeon co
uld safely operate with. Your pyjamas would be in creditable creases under your pillow and all your dirty socks in a linen-bag. If you had wanted to see me you would have. You would have to leave excuses about being busy to people like me.’

  ‘You have too high an opinion of my orderliness, Dr Maitland. My lack of organization, like other people’s, calls out to Heaven for vengeance. I should have been to visit you earlier than this. I hope you are happy here and that you won’t find it necessary in future to poke fun at the work of others.’

  The little man then risked offering his hand. The way it was done was suddenly a hint of integrity utter within its limits. Maitland shook the hand and sat down.

  ‘Thank you. But I’m under a style of house arrest.’

  ‘That’s a bit exorbitant.’

  ‘I suppose so. But what I mean is that the monsignor is taking trouble with me. I suppose you know that he dragged me away the other day to attend an exemplary death and we nearly died an exemplary death together coming home from it.’

  ‘Monsignor Cairns,’ Egan said like a judgment.

  ‘Yes, I shouldn’t be flippant. I’m not a busy priest at all, in any real sense. But I’m getting my thesis together for publication. For once, I couldn’t afford the time or the split skull.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  They exchanged names, Maurice for James. Maitland was suddenly very willing that over the rubble of scholarship on his table an improbable friendship should grow. Only now that it began to lift did Maitland feel the full oppression of the Grete-and-Brendan business, of the Manichean quality of Nolan’s injunctions on hygiene at that time, of the veiled accusation before the accident that he peddled oral contraceptives in the confessional, of the accusation afterwards that he was spiritual kin to Jonah.

  Before friendship formed, however, and while there was still time to deal unscrupulously with the little canon lawyer, Maitland got in the question, ‘I wonder could you tell me how long before the Sunday do you have to submit the text of a cathedral sermon to Dr Nolan?’