Three Cheers For The Paraclete Page 6

  He said, ‘James, controversy provokes me. Please forgive me for insulting your honestly held view of the matter.’

  Maitland said that, as a matter of fact, it was his own arrogance that required forgiving …

  ‘I keep on forgetting,’ Egan protested, ‘how unfit I am to judge, to judge anything. As for mentioning it to His Grace, which I might have done in good faith, well, the older I get, James, the more I begin to see that friendship is a primary duty and …’

  ‘That’s very gracious, Maurice.’ Maitland was half-amused by this duologue as mannered as Nolan’s haircut.

  ‘Well, I must go,’ the little priest said, and bared his wrist. A navigator’s watch sat there tocking with utmost dedication and no sense of unfitness at ferrying Egan across seas deadly but allegorical. So he was off, on the way to defend the bond, carrying a pork-pie hat so spotless and an ox-blood valise so lambent that nobody would ever have suspected he wasn’t arrogant.

  6

  IT HAPPENED THAT Costello and Egan were the archbishop’s representatives on the judging panel of the Couraigne prize for religious art. Their work was to prevent the blasphemous or obscene from winning, for Mrs Couraigne had been devout, a painter of saintly apotheoses, most of them now distemper-coloured and hanging in the corridors of the House of Studies. Knowing that all talents but one in a million date and become distemper-coloured, Maitland was saved from resentment of Mrs Couraigne, though her work heightened the spiritual flatulence of life in Nolan’s house.

  The prize-winners were named in a bank foyer on a Friday evening. Here Mrs Couraigne’s latter-day sisters, in body-stockings and zebra trousers, had taken the hanging area and the catering arrangements by storm. Tediously messianic men in net-singlets and jeans recurred every few yards. Of course, there were artists who had found favour with judging panels or who taught technique and, become respectable, did not need to dress aberrantly or rampage through platefuls of savouries. And then, the public servants of art, gallery people, trustees, entrepreneurs; and the press running down notables in the corners, running down Egan and Costello who, as comptrollers of the distasteful, were said to have vetoed a number of entries. And as guests of Egan and Costello, Nolan and Maitland sat on the fringe of the excitement, holding sticky sherries.

  It was almost impossible for a painting to win the Couraigne prize if the archbishop’s two delegates debarred it, but they could not debar a painting from being hung. Costello had meant to be vocal about a number of those hung, about a St Paul who looked like Benito Mussolini, about a Senator McCarthy Moses moving in on the Golden Calfers, about a gentle Judas quavering before a feral Christ. So he and Egan were soon chivvied loose from their chairs and washed on strong tides of controversy down the length of the room.

  Maitland and Nolan sat alone.

  ‘Strange crowd, James,’ said Nolan. ‘Aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes. Black predominates. I wonder why.’

  Nolan couldn’t say. He forwent the second half of his sherry and pushed his glass to the far rim of an occasional table. ‘I knew Mrs Couraigne, you know. She was a daily communicant. I don’t think she would recognize this.’ He pointed to the hanging area. ‘Look,’ he went on, counting through his programme, ‘there are four, five, seven – seven of those messes called “Epiphany”, and one, two, three, four called “Nativity”, and you could label all the Nativities “Epiphany” and all the Epiphanies “Nativity”, and they’d still mean as much or as little. My heaven, look at that.’

  Across the room, a vegetable prophet, growing out of rock and blossoming into flowers sable and gold, affronted him.

  ‘That mess, James, is actually called “Isaiah after the Rain”. And they’ve got clean away with hanging it.’

  ‘Perhaps the flowers are symbols of spiritual growth.’

  ‘That’s the trouble. They get away with blasphemy under the name of symbolism. By the way, when am I going to see your sermon, James?’

  Maitland maintained the even rhythm of chat. ‘I didn’t intend showing it to you,’ he said. ‘It seems that you don’t ask to be shown the sermons of other members of the staff. I think that if you distrust my orthodoxy, it would be better to take me off the preaching list.’

  ‘It must be obvious that you are not exactly in the same position as most of the other members of the staff.’

  The young priest stared at the gloss of the new shoes he had remembered to buy. ‘But don’t you want us to test you for a fractional fit, father?’ the appalled salesman had asked him. ‘No thanks,’ he’d said. ‘My feet have no responsibilities, except to themselves.’

  Now he admitted, ‘I realize that. Most of you have managed to convey the idea that my position is different.’

  ‘Don’t blame the others. You haven’t sought them out. They are, taken all round, as fine a body of priests as it could be any other priest’s privilege to share his life with.’

  As evidence, Costello’s robust laughter rose at the far end of the lobby.

  ‘Not everyone has it in him to establish himself with others from a position of disadvantage. It’s a matter of temperament.’

  ‘In your case it’s a matter of self-pity. I honestly believe that, James.’

  ‘You’re right, monsignor. But self-pity is a matter of temperament, isn’t it? I feel that all your priests are established men, with niches on committees sacred and profane. It’s not my place to do the approaching. I have no right to make you people welcome in your own house.’

  ‘This,’ Nolan whispered, for a young waiter in cutaway coat and bearing a tray of tiny beers was dancing towards them, ‘is all part of a false judgment you persist in making between us others and yourself. As far as I’m concerned, James, you are part of the us.’

  ‘The fathers haven’t got anything to drink,’ said the waiter in full voice, and fluttered his eyelids, knowing an impropriety when he saw one, the impropriety being that priests-forever-according-to-the-order-of-Melchizedek should go without sherry when the body-stockings were nearly reeling with it. He was, very likely, a satiric gent and a rampant anti-clerical.

  Both fathers shook their heads at him. Maitland lied, ‘A priest always finds wine too evocative to be enjoyed.’ He wanted to hurt Nolan, for, as he knew, Nolan felt a spouse-like identity with the Mass, whereas he himself felt only a custodian, performer of someone else’s fantasy.

  Maitland succeeded too well. Nolan would be as angry as an old wife within ten seconds and use all the old-wife’s sharp practice, but for the moment the mouth opened, an old man’s head of pallid teeth could be seen, and the point of the bottom lip rose to cover them. It was a glimpse of age and its vulnerability and it made Maitland properly ashamed. The cutaway coat cut away, tittering.

  ‘So this is the way your resentment works,’ the monsignor decided. ‘To pretend to those who have nothing to be proud of that we are of the same ilk as them.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But let’s have no more cant about my belonging in your house.’

  ‘And you wonder why you don’t belong in my house. After that.’

  ‘I’m not an outsider because I used a waiter in argument. I used a waiter because I’m an outsider. Give a dog a bad name …’

  ‘A priest is a man of lonely trials. If you didn’t like that idea, you should never have let yourself be ordained.’

  Maitland repeated this adage about lonely trials beneath his breath as a form of capitulation. Axioms paralysed him; he could not prevail against them. Rather than try, he watched the room. Even on such miserly liquor, the crowd had begun to blend. Egan was making his points to the creator of McCarthy-Moses, and a gallery trustee laughed and patted the skin-tight back of a bone-tight girl.

  As if to himself, Maitland said, ‘Apart from a mis-begotten account of some young matron’s confession, had from your sisters, I wonder just what it is that you find substandard in me.’

  Spittle was flying from the perfect teeth and fury of the painter of Senator Moses. Before these forces little
Egan stood, patience entrenched, ticking off his arguments on the plump fingers of his left hand. That degree of patience was a provocation, Maitland thought, and one of the panel thought so too, and moved in to soothe the artist.

  Nolan was explaining coldly, ‘I take no cognizance of women, not even of my sisters, and I give them no place in the government of the Church when I am in my right mind. I would have thought you had the kindness to believe that I was not in my right mind on the afternoon of our accident.’

  Meanwhile, at the passionate end of the foyer, the painter’s girl slurred Egan. It seemed so lively that Maitland regretted Nolan and himself were off after hounds of their own. They could see, though Nolan hadn’t yet, that some notable was protecting the little priest with outspread arms. Then the artist and his girl stood back, chanting, ‘Oh, angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here,’ and so on, as if they were reciting Egan’s code of art. People faced in upon the priest’s discomfort and wore their humanist half-smiles like the worst sort of cruelty. Maitland was about to excuse himself and perhaps go to his friend’s help, when the incident, too rugged a growth, faded into the synthetic bonhomie of four or five converging officials.

  The monsignor had not been distracted. ‘I was alarmed, so was His Grace, by an article of yours in an English review. I don’t want to be offensive, but I have to say that it’s an indication of the Church’s peril that this article was ever published. I say this, James, though I realize what pride scholars take in what they have had published. None the less …’

  ‘The article on Luther?’ Maitland suggested.

  ‘That’s the one. Now I know little history, Dr Maitland, but it seemed to me that you were saying Luther and Aquinas were in agreement, that the Supreme Pontiff fell into a trap in condemning Luther. Is this a correct reading?’

  ‘Not exactly. I claimed that they were in agreement on the basic question, which was the nature of the Redemption. As people like to say these days, it was a question of semantics.’

  Nolan’s hands began to shake in a small way. They savaged the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘And you still believe this?’

  ‘I believe that the gulf between Luther and the traditional doctrine was not such as to warrant excommunication, schism, war and so on.’

  ‘A question of semantics.’ Nolan struck a light to his cigarette in a near-frenzy of rightness. He smoked it held between his middle fingers, as many women who learnt to smoke in the twenties do. His reason was different to theirs – he saved the index and thumb for the usages of the altar. Yet he did look like an angry refugee from an age of du Maurier and post-impressionism. ‘Luther’s denial of tradition a matter of semantics? Luther’s attack on the doctrine of the Incarnation and on the Sacraments?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, the rift became greater once Rome and Luther had divorced each other, but there was nothing in Luther’s early teaching that need have caused the schism. However, all those qualifications are made in the article itself. If you didn’t accept its drift in print, it won’t do us any good if I detail it here.’

  ‘I never thought I would hear such hogwash from a priest trained in our House of Studies,’ Nolan said and crushed out his cigarette.

  Confused by anger, Maitland took out his handkerchief and was constrained, seeing it in his hand, to blow his nose unecessarily and with adenoidal caution. ‘Oh, orthodoxy,’ he muttered then. Nothing more necessary, nothing more inconsequential. The world keeps to its stale or knowing ways, no matter what. Pride of the eyes prevails as surely on most canvases, pride of life holds up the walls of banks and puts the pillars in and the loveless furniture from Scandinavia. Just as surely, hands of influential men feign fatherly interest on the waists of artists’ molls who breakfast, come rain, hail, predestination or signs in the heavens, just as surely on methedrine and cornflakes.

  ‘How do I know what you might say from a cathedral pulpit?’ Nolan wondered.

  Maitland said, ‘If you wished, I could give you some sort of promise.’ He had lost interest in Nolan’s demands and in what the programme described as ‘one of the art events of the cultural year in this country’. It was apter than Nolan suspected that the president of a House of Studies for priests should be here on the outskirts of the event. For the priests pursued their orthodoxy and the artists theirs, orthodoxies alien to each other, orthodoxies in conflict with society at large, orthodoxies prolific in closed minds. Of which his was one, but could not challenge Nolan’s.

  A woman of dark, gangling and slightly speckled beauty was speaking now to Egan. She had a long, very special neck rising from a cowled dress of the same colour as the monsignor’s stock, and she bent to Egan who was three inches shorter and whose lips were, at that moment, compressed toutishly as if he were giving the inside story on something.

  Orthodoxies prolific in closed minds.

  ‘You could ruin your career with a rash sermon. I’ll preach myself if there is any doubt about yours. His Grace and I both consider it necessary to know exactly what you intend to say. The main danger of our not knowing is to yourself, James, and it’s no small danger.’

  Now that drinks had been had and the crowd were familiar with the form and colour and even the texture of all the visions hung there, a general listlessness seemed to have come down on the occasion. This and Nolan’s speech were both broken in upon by some dutiful hand-clapping. Like a master-stroke of ennui, a vice-regal party made an entrance and speeches began. Under this cover, Maitland excused himself from Nolan and crept across the room. When he was obscured from the monsignor by thickets of art-lovers, he stood on his own, applauding the awards.

  As soon as the speeches ended, a very elegant young man assailed him from the side.

  ‘Father,’ he said, ‘you’ve seen that fierce-looking Christ over there?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Don’t you think it improper, honestly, that an interpretation like that should be actually hung in an exhibition of religious paintings?’

  The young man squinted at the painting and turned a geometrically barbered neck on Maitland. He seemed to be possessed by a strong sectarian anger.

  ‘It’s sad,’ Maitland was willing to say. ‘Christian mystics are overwhelmed by the very opposite of that.’ He nodded at the picture. ‘They’re impressed to gasping point by his – what? – elected defencelessness, you could say. That sort of thing over there hurts. On the other hand, it should make us wonder what we’ve done to earn him so much hate.’

  ‘What we’ve done?’ the boy echoed. ‘By we, do you mean priests, father?’

  ‘Priests among others, perhaps.’

  ‘You wouldn’t see that painting then as the work of the forces of darkness?’

  ‘Not altogether. We’ve done a lot to make Christ seem anti-human. And anything that’s anti-human ends up hated by people who can’t be said to be the utter dregs.’

  ‘There seems to be a strong element of hatred right through the exhibition,’ the young man ventured, and spent some minutes depressing Maitland with an interpretation of some of the dingiest paintings in the hanging area. At length Costello loomed and made signs with his eyes.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Maitland. ‘It’s time for us to go, I think.’

  The haranguing boy said, ‘Certainly, father,’ and vanished.

  ‘Wanted to deliver you from that fellow,’ Costello explained. ‘Bloody old woman. What was he on about?’

  ‘Just orating about some of the paintings that gave yourself and Egan trouble.’

  ‘I’m sick of all this carping, James. You know, every one of these bloody artists, emotional creatures and all as they are, accept the decisions of the other judges as final, but annually the art community drops garbage on little Egan and me from a great height. Why? You’re a wild one, James – now, no blushing. You tell me why they can’t see that bad religion can’t be made into good religious art. Where’s Egan?’

  Egan was still speaking with his
dark lady.

  ‘See that woman with Maurice?’ Costello asked. ‘Very statuesque. She’s an old client of ours in the marriage courts. I don’t suppose it’s a breach of ethics to tell you that. It’s good to see her looking well. A person gets to know these people very well despite the requisite aloofness. She was in a very poor state by the time her annulment came through.’

  ‘She seems friendly enough to Egan, even though he must have been the villain in court.’

  ‘Egan’s a very kind little chap though, very kind. If you didn’t know, you’d think a defensor vinculi would be the most hated of men. All the marriages he defends are putrefying on their feet by the time they get to us. But there they are, Egan and the Tully woman, polite to each other. Not that they shouldn’t be polite. It’s only good sense.’

  Maitland waited while Costello went to collect Egan. He saw the woman give Costello the curtest of greetings and stand back. As the two canon lawyers came back across the floor, Costello could be heard asking, ‘What’s the matter with her? A man only does his job.’

  In the House of Studies, Saturdays were normal working-days. Yet there was always a Saturday feel about the light, a feel of Saturday-morning big spending, of the Saturday bounty of gardens, of the drama of blossoming premierships and enterprises on the totalizator, all of it subtly transmitted from the town below. So, as Maitland came down to breakfast, the grains of the ether seemed to indict him with being an alien.

  Within the refectory, the priests at table appeared to have complaints against him. Not just Nolan and Costello, who held their heads up and stared obliquely as judges; but Egan and three other priests, who had till then treated him with that quaint inadvertence that comes from being too long resident in closed community, watched him from beneath their eyelids. As he said a Grace and sat, Costello sopped his mouth with a napkin and rose.