Three Cheers For The Paraclete Page 9

  Maitland came close to smiling at the pretentious word. His scholarship might perhaps have been vast enough, if he were a layman, to allow him to teach history to senior boys.

  ‘It belongs to me,’ His Grace said, ‘as much as it belongs to yourself, and if ever there was a question of obedience, it would belong to me or my successor more than to yourself. Remember that and your safety is assured.’

  8

  THE NEXT DAY Maitland had a small letter of thanks from his cousin, Joe Quinlan. ‘We upped and invested in some land,’ said Joe. ‘For which much thanks to you.’ The letter evoked summer and the day of what was for Maitland a truer homecoming than a mere disembarking onto a wharf could ever be. The day had been a Thursday late in February on which he caught a train towards those flat towns he had known as a child. The sets of lines ran out molten blue to the suburb where his maternal cousin, Joseph Quinlan, lived.

  In Europe he had remembered the sun but forgotten the summer. So, as he sat through fifteen station stops and watched old men’s brave morning collars travelling home sodden, the exact flavour of the Februaries of his childhood returned in a rush and remained. February, the crude exposer of the mortal and the makeshift, of the mortal and makeshift shirt and floral dress, of mortal and makeshift James Maitland, the sun boring at his left, window-side ear.

  He was all prickly heat by the time a station came with Joe Quinlan’s address on it. Outside an empty supermarket stood the right bus. Rolling off at last, it showed him all the things he could have predicted. Down flat streets jury-masted with power poles, the bus was hailed by neanderthal wives near looted phone booths, joyless service-stations, abject corner shops.

  He got out at a street of plaster-board houses. Plaster-board might have done well in dainty Japan but could assert nothing under the massive censure of this sky. On his corner in the desert, he could hear a television set promising a trip to Tahiti for the neatest correct entry opened.

  Maitland could not remember the seventeen-year-old who had gone to become a priest and himself at twenty-nine; could not even remember what the seventeen-year-old had believed (though it was bound to be nearly everything). But he knew that in that young lost mind marriage had meant a suburb like this one, out of which the clean eternity of the priesthood had called him. Maitland stood a second being sad for the boy, forgiving the boy’s zeal.

  The Quinlans lived in 27, whose side had been barricaded with an iron gate. Beyond this he saw a fowlhouse and could hear the furtive birds. He climbed the barricade and came to the back of the house. Here a woman, hidden from him by oddments of family underwear, pegged out clothes. Sensing him, she pushed through the washing, and a small dog charged from beneath hung bedsheets.

  ‘Oh, father,’ said the woman, ‘you gave me a scare. They’ve been so many attacks in this district.’

  She was a square, dark little woman, very tired, hardly a welcome left in her. But she had not had the scare she claimed. Maitland could tell she knew that if he were the local curate seeking money or sacrifice, she had him at a disadvantage by reducing him to a part of the general male threat.

  ‘You should use the front door, father. I’m not to know you’re a priest, am I?’

  ‘Mrs Joe Quinlan, isn’t it?’

  She nodded and folded her arms, on the left of which hung a red plastic bucket of pegs meaning that she couldn’t give him much time.

  ‘Yes. We go to Mass up here at Saint Bernard’s, but Joe hasn’t got the time to join societies and things.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m Joe’s cousin. My mother was a Quinlan. My name’s James Maitland.’

  She said without pleasure that she was pleased to meet him.

  They stood in silence. You could hear only the soft mourning of Joe Quinlan’s and a hundred other fowls in other yards.

  Maitland managed at last to ask, ‘Will Joe be home soon?’

  ‘About a quarter to five.’

  ‘Do you mind if I wait and see him?’

  ‘I’m Morna,’ she said. It seemed that someone might have told her, long ago and well, never to give direct answers to men in uniform.

  ‘Don’t you believe me, Morna, when I say who I am?’

  The small dog, tensed back on his hindquarters, kept his rage close to the boil and showed Maitland yellow but functional canines.

  ‘Oh, I know Joe had a cousin a priest. You’re him?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been overseas. That’s why I haven’t seen him lately. There were two Christmases when we were ten or eleven, that Joe and I used to spend all our time together. My people lived on this line, only further down. Joe and I exchanged the blood-brotherhood once.’ He laughed.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked without tolerance.

  ‘Well, you know how an Indian and a white man would slit their wrists and mix their blood and become blood-brothers? Joe and I did that once. Joe’s mother beat the hide off us for it.’

  ‘If I had a boy did that, I’d beat the hide off him myself. I haven’t got any time for that sort of thing. This violence on the television is why a woman can’t be safe in her own yard.’

  Maitland coughed to acknowledge the battle well lost.

  ‘Would you like to wait inside?’ she asked.

  ‘If you don’t mind.’ She had her doubts, you could see. He might want Joe’s time, mind, money. This blood-brotherhood business was only a way of establishing a claim – or so she feared.

  ‘All right. The kitchen’s in a bit of a mess. Roddy’s in there in his high chair. Don’t frighten him.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘Morna.’

  She smiled briefly. At least she was sure from his long, untanned body and soapy hands that he was not some marauding piece-worker.

  At the back door Maitland took off his black coat and stock. He must avoid scaring his small kinsman who had made a compost of milk and sodden bread on his meal-tray and was furrowing the mess with his forefinger.

  ‘Hullo, Roddy,’ James said. ‘I’m your cousin. I used to know your father.’

  Roddy did not move. His hand remained suspended on one finger, like a stork, in the mess of his lunch.

  Behind him, stew bubbled on the gas stove. Torn hollands hung above the sink and clotted fat lay on the draining-board. Farther inside the house, a television set performed to an empty room. ‘And how often,’ a professional voice asked, on a programme of live agony, ‘how often have these fights ended in a physical assault by your husband?’

  At last Morna came in and picked up a teatowel from the floor. Her slippered foot herded dust and crumpled paper and spent matches out of the way under the stove.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, father?’ she said.

  Suddenly the old flesh-hatred of his youth turned his stomach and he was aware of what the inconsolable sacrifice was – to live in plaster-board with such a woman.

  ‘It’s all right, Morna,’ he told her urgently, and took improper comfort in knowing that he would be home in Nolan’s house by seven.

  By a quarter to five the sunlight had taken on that level and quite stable glare which threatens never to set. Home came Joe Quinlan in his grey post-office uniform. They heard him enter as if he were in the act of taking the inadequacies of his home very much to heart. They heard him taking the barricade to heart and telling the children, for Christ’s sake that was the last time he was going to tell them to leave the chickens alone.

  He blinked to find Maitland in the kitchen, sitting at the table in white shirt-sleeves but inescapably clerical with his black coat hitched on the chair and his stock among a mess of children’s drawings on the table-top.

  Morna seemed edgy.

  ‘This is Father Maitland, Joe,’ she said; and then, unscrupulously, ‘He says he’s your cousin.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said.

  As if trapped into it by his jagged distrust of Maitland, he kissed his wife. When he held out his hand to the priest, it was like a defence. ‘Glad to see you again,’ he said; but he waited
for Maitland to present the barbed demand, for piety or cash or something else beyond him. God forgive, thought Maitland, priests and insurance agents who have taught man so well that their greetings are merely feints.

  ‘You remember me, don’t you? Jimmy Maitland. I was telling Morna how we were blood-brothers. I don’t think she approved.’

  Joe ventured a smile. ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said. He meant, that was before everything changed; it doesn’t give you any claim. ‘That’s a long time ago.’

  ‘We were ten, I suppose,’ Maitland supplied. Before puberty, which, in boys, voided previous friendships.

  ‘Had a cuppa?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Morna, why didn’t you hang father’s coat up for him?’

  Morna frowned. Awe and suspicion – that was why.

  Maitland said, ‘It’s all right. I have to go soon.’

  ‘You can’t stay for tea?’ the husband asked joyously, and sweated on the answer.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to the House of Studies by about seven. It’s a long way.’

  ‘That’s a pity. Look, father.’

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Look, Jim, I’ve just got to fix up the chooks. Do you mind? Just a few minutes.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Maitland said quickly.

  Joe fetched bran from under the house. Just beyond the limits of the yard began a haze and an opalescence that gave a false remoteness to the rest of the flat suburb. Morna, seeing this, by some instinct called the children in, Joe’s small girl would not obey but ran after him, while Morna yelled threats from the door. She was more frantic than angry. The phenomenon of the priest, topped by this starchy tide of heat in which her neighbours’ homes rode, warned her to make her house tight and get her children in. Maitland apprehended her fear and expected Joe to turn to her, But Joe carried the bran, and the small girl trailed Joe.

  She said, ‘Are you going to feed the chooks with father?’

  ‘I’m going to feed ’em with bran. Can’t you hear your mother? By Christ, you’ve been asking for it lately.’

  Over his shoulder Maitland saw the girl limp away with a pubescent type of disdain, ten years ahead of herself at seven. An instinct nagged him that there was something to be done with the child, something immediate that he would be able to identify if he were any sort of being. The girl, however, was quicker in reaching the back steps than the instinct was in coming to a head. It ceased to press, and he and Joe were alone then, which was what he had come for.

  Maitland, outside the coop, kept the door closed while Joe went in to his birds. They rushed him, tocking with avarice, and he took offence at them and broadcast their food behind their backs and hated them even more fervently when they wheeled back to it.

  ‘Joe,’ Maitland called. He looked around him for a gradual way of telling a poor man that you wanted to give him twelve hundred dollars, being your advance on the sales of a paperback you wouldn’t admit to having written. You could, with ease, give a sum such as that to the Red Cross, to archdioceses or other bodies inured to thousands, who could be trusted to spend or save it efficiently. But an archdiocese did not have the pride of a poor Quinlan.

  ‘Joe, I have a bank cheque for twelve hundred dollars. I wonder could you accept it from me?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Joe said, visibly a man who had heard this sort of thing before. How would you like to own your own swimming-pool? With every one of our $65 suits sold, we will give away free a ticket which could … Joe had never met the owner of a ticket which did.

  ‘If you can use it you can have it.’

  The fowls squeaked close to the man, who aimed his boot at them without intent and began to come to his own conclusions.

  ‘Oh, I know what you mean, father. It’s kind of you to offer. But we couldn’t even pay interest on it.’

  ‘I don’t mean it for a loan. I mean, do you want it?’

  Joe laughed through his nose.

  ‘Who are you trying to string along, father?’

  ‘Jim,’ said Maitland.

  ‘If you are father, I’d rather call you father.’

  ‘Joe, please take it. If you don’t, I’ll have to take it to some charity.’

  Joe picked up the birds’ drinking-tin and shook the water out. It fell like a pattern of shadow on the dust. He still smiled.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ he said idly.

  ‘Nothing. I’d rather you had it and did whatever you liked with it. For once.’

  ‘We’re not good Catholics.’ With the white-hot sun niggling his left shoulder, he went further, ‘We’re never likely to be.’

  Behind them, in the house, a child began sobbing while Morna said she’d told it often enough and it could damn-well expect the same every time.

  ‘You don’t understand, Joe.’

  ‘I’ll say I don’t, father.’

  ‘Say that while I was in Europe I did some writing and got this sum of money for it. That is exactly what did happen, in fact. Well, I don’t want it, that’s all. And I thought you might do me the honour of using it for me.’

  ‘Do you the honour? Come off it, father!’

  ‘It’s indecent for priests to have big sums of money, that’s all. It’s not a priest’s business.’

  At least he was being taken with seriousness now. He wished to God that Joe would hurry the decision, for he felt sick from the heat, and the thick air hung as palpable as cotton wool. He heard with some longing an evening train going home on the distant line.

  Joe kept arguing.

  ‘You don’t really mean that, father. Look, you might be a priest, but that’s no excuse to muck me around. It’s indecent for a priest to own money, you say. How many of your mates believe that?’

  ‘You’re being too hard on them, Joe. I feel I’m not allowed to keep this, the way I’m not allowed to keep a woman.’

  ‘Say I took it?’

  ‘Say you took it off my hands.’

  ‘Yeah, if I did, how am I supposed to spend it? You don’t know me. I mean, that blood-brotherhood business is a load of cock. For all you know, I might just do the lot on booze.’

  ‘Spending it is your business.’ Maitland took an envelope from his pocket. ‘The bank cheque’s in there, very official, made out in your name, Joe. I took the liberty …’

  Joe considered complaining, but accepted the envelope instead, just for a look.

  ‘Twelve hundred’s a decent deposit on land.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Joe. It’s your affair. My God, though, I’d be grateful.’

  But Joe was still merely considering the outside chance of his accepting the gift and had hold of it only with thumb and index finger. ‘There are charities,’ he suggested. ‘Why …?’

  ‘Why is my business and spending it is yours.’

  For Maitland couldn’t say that he had felt it necessary to find someone unlovely and not blatantly pitiable nor compellingly deserving, wise or frugal. That Joe might be inept or even stupid in the spending was what made the giving peculiarly worth while.

  ‘It’s not all that much,’ he pursued. ‘It won’t buy much. It might start something, though.’

  ‘I’d like some land,’ Joe admitted. ‘Sloping land with a bit of sandstone for a rockery. I’d like some trees on it, pines and gums, so you don’t have to see your neighbour’s house first thing each morning, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  ‘Remember how our people had a bit of pride? If they had a door strangers could see into, they grew something in front of it, or put a trellis up. No one’s got any pride round here. And the landlord’s a bloody Grand Master of the Masons or something. Wait there a second.’

  Joe made off down the yard to fill his water-tin.

  ‘Don’t tell Morna till I’ve gone,’ Maitland hissed after him.

  ‘I’m just going to the tap.’

  And Maitland could hear Morna pestering Joe from the back window, the man saying
scarcely a word.

  When he came back, Joe said, ‘What do you do with a bank cheque?’

  ‘Just sign it. They’ll show you at the bank.’

  ‘This isn’t a joke?’

  Maitland raised both hands to his ears and shook his head. ‘Whose joke would it be likely to be?’

  He could scarcely believe how desperate he was to get away. If charity was an immersion in other people, he did not know how to immerse himself in Morna and Joe; but he knew as well that if he did know he would not do it, and that this was what his antiseptic bank cheque was a measure of.

  ‘Keep the envelope!’ he said.

  Joe grinned. ‘Morna’s seen it. She thinks you’ve talked me into joining some holy society.’

  ‘Don’t believe in ’em,’ Maitland said.

  He watched his cousin re-enter the coop and put down the can ungrudgingly.

  He said gratefully, ‘I’d better collect my coat.’

  9

  NOW THAT HIS work had been parcelled off to the publisher, Maitland began to give up some nights of the week to having three students in his room to talk about their history or, better still, just to talk. He dreaded, as any man must whose image of the profoundest God is a surgical trolley, to intervene in their deeper beliefs and resentments. What he most enjoyed was the palliative work of making them cups of coffee and cutting them cake. Over such suppers he met nine, sometimes twelve, students each week, and promised himself that after twenty weeks he would know every student in the House.

  Gaiety brews easily among monks, soldiers and all other cloistered men. Maitland had only to make it clear that they were his guests, to move the radiator closer, to produce the yellow cake-tin with its picture of the King of the Belgians, to set the odd brotherhood of his four cups ready for coffee, and these mechanical and graceless acts assured the success of the evening. Their bridegroom – the books of spirituality spoke of their souls as feminine and the Lord as their bridegroom – had not brought them to a house where all was accustomed, ceremonious; so that some of them would always remember Maitland’s makeshift soirées as pleasant. Which, in itself, was some achievement for a man so unskilled in brotherhood.