It was a funny world, Maitland afterwards thought, in which satellites were no longer news but sermons were. Perhaps the odds against a sermon were greater than those satellites had to face – the press always cherishing the outsider who comes home.
Knowing this, one of the congregation telephoned a daily tabloid that dealt with religion in a becomingly sentimental manner, and reported Maitland’s vivid sermon.
‘Regular mud-slinger, it seems,’ the duty editor told one of his skeleton staff. ‘Do you think you can sit through the ten o’clock Mass? We might be glad of it if that cyclone veers off before Pago-Pago. And get a photograph.’
The editor himself remained to wonder whether ‘Savonarola of the Suburbs!’ was too literate a tag.
Maitland, stepping from the sacristy, was asked for a photograph, which was taken the next instant.
‘We heard your sermon with great interest, father, and –’
‘You can’t print the sermon.’
‘Sermons are public property, father. Been that way since the Lake of Galilee.’
He argued and, as he did, another photograph was taken.
In this way Maitland’s thirty-hour siege-by-telephone of the cathedral presbytery began. Manners demanded that His Grace be warned, but His Grace was not available for warning. The prelate had left to open a new wing at the Dominican convent, and by the time the Dominican convent sent someone to deal with Maitland’s call, which must have rung in the nuns’ old wing for half the afternoon, His Grace was on his way to Pontifical Vespers at a Benedictine monastery. The Benedictines neglected their phone with a neglect quite worthy of the Dominicans, and when some young monk answered, the archbishop had gone five minutes, bound for a Hibernian supper.
Later that evening His Grace was at home but reciting matins and lauds. Suddenly, an hour came at which one didn’t telephone even people with whom one was on the cosiest of terms.
His Grace’s private secretary said, ‘You should get him between eight-thirty and nine tomorrow.’
Maitland respectfully split the time and chose a quarter to nine. The archbishop had gone to present a sodality flag in the chapel of a girls’ school. By mid-morning he was attending an aunt’s sick-bed; he rested after lunch; but at three he baffled Maitland by answering the phone in person and, of course, listening tolerantly. The afternoon papers were, in any case, already on sale. Pago-Pago had been spared at Maitland’s expense. There were no ninety-year-old sires that Monday, and Miss Associated Canneries had gone back to stoning peaches; their places had been filled by a frayed band-leader granted a decree nisi because his wife took her boxer (dog) to bed with her, and by Maitland himself, dubbed ‘A Power in the Pulpit’ (a triumph for clarity over erudition).
Nolan met him in the corridor that evening and said something about the wisdom of young priests’ keeping each week to the approved sermon topic as set down in the sermon list for that year.
The following day, the afternoon paper carried seven letters from people who had suffered under Investment General or its ilk. The third day, the managing director of Allied Projects made it known that the archdiocese owned shares in both itself and its mother-sister-company, Investment General.
Once more Maitland found out in the refectory. This time it was evening. One could hear the dark wind thudding at the windows and be solaced by the batteries of steaming teapots. The ritual went forward as before: Nolan seated in the sovereign chair with his closed face aimed at the reader, as if the Kingdom depended on enunciation; Costello striding in late, hatchet-man and ornament of grace, under his arm the evening paper to be dropped in passing on Maitland’s dish.
Maitland sat forward, his hands clamped beneath the table, his legs trembling on tiptoe. The news was that that mammonish frowning gentleman, the managing director, had presumed that Dr Maitland had not meant to condemn Allied Projects especially since the archdiocese was one of the company’s larger debenture holders. Three columns of comment stood beneath this basic information, but Maitland didn’t care to read it now. He rose and felt exposed before the racket of cutlery and the reader’s crisp evening voice. There was room for a thin man to move behind the line of chairs if it were done with care. A thin angry man could manage unprecedented things; such as to take the president by surprise, make him blink and drag the presidential chair, both hands on its seat, closer in to his spine. Maitland formulated to himself: ‘I am rampaging, the whole refectory must be able to see it. That sainted bastard …’ Who was by now seated and pouring mint sauce on roast meat. Aiming the rag neither at nor away from Costello’s meal, he growled, ‘Thank you, doctor’, began to feel silly edging past three other priests, all with dinners on their hands, his anger clinging to him like a morass. Free, he set his mouth, and his face admitted no guilt all down the length of the refectory.
He left the door of his room open, wanting Nolan and Costello to be able to find him. On his desk rested an old Observer – one of those corpses that occasionally surfaced there when masses of books or notes were shifted. He opened it straightaway to the potted cleverness of the stage and book reviews. They did not divert him. He would find himself holding the sane pages in clenched fists.
First came Costello. He took time to stand still and look dismayed. So Maitland snatched the first word.
He said, ‘Look, doctor, next time I make a gaffe, if that’s what this is, I won’t stand its being dropped on my plate.’
‘I am sorry.’ By which Costello meant that some people were edgy.
‘Also you won’t confront me at a time when I can’t answer you in words.’
‘All right, all right.’ One worshipful hand was extended, conciliating the other. Maitland remembered that Costello might be archbishop one day, that that hand might have to be kissed. ‘But I have to say, we can get into terrible holes tackling social or economic matters. For one thing, society and economics aren’t as simple as they were in the Middle Ages. You have to be trained to be clear on that sort of thing these days. It isn’t as if there are howling inequalities any more. The country’s happy.’
Maitland remembered the Quinlans’ suburb. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed,’ he said.
‘Oh, use your eyes, James. It’s the patently artificial things a priest can safely attack. The mass media, materialism, advertising, the threat of Communism, paganism in the arts. Add all that to faith and morals and you’ve got enough for a lifetime of sermons.’ Costello snorted then, in self-effacement. ‘You don’t mind, surely, my giving off all this? I mean, we’re all equals and friends, let’s hope. More than friends, brothers. I suppose a test of friendship is the amount of forced feeding of advice one friend is willing to take from another.’
The patrician hand became an organ of friendship. Costello was a man of high personal standards, among which was included charity to the wrongdoer. Bound to defer to this ugly charity, Maitland shook the hand, saying, ‘I apologize if I’ve been rude. I’ll remember it with embarrassment when you’re a bishop –’
‘Oh, that’s the Holy Ghost’s affair,’ Costello confessed spaciously.
‘– however, if you attempt to beard me like that again, I’ll be very angry.’
‘Of course you will.’ Costello looked mildly quizzical. ‘How quaint of you to be offended at that sort of thing. You should have warned me beforehand,’ said the eyes which were broad, bright, favourite-uncle’s eyes.
An hour later, when Maitland, still unsoothed, had tried his breviary, his books, even, once more, his one copy of the Observer, Nolan arrived. His attitude paralleled Costello’s. He entered apologetically, like one impinging on a tragedy. Old goat, thought Maitland.
‘His Grace is on the downstairs phone, James.’ He stood back then, very morgue-attendant. ‘Enough said,’ said his face. On the dark stairs, the president told no one in particular, ‘His Grace is very upset about this. Upset and discountenanced.’ The antique word stuck abominably in Maitland’s craw.
Just then the students were procee
ding in a monastic column-of-two’s. Edmonds gave him a thumbs-up sign. He was glad there was a corridor to escape down.
‘There,’ Nolan told him, and pointed to the booth, curtained, with an easy chair in it. Maitland glanced at its floral chumminess and felt abandoned.
‘Your Grace?’
‘This does put us squarely in the sights, doesn’t it, James?’
‘Your Grace, I am sorry.’
‘James, I detest this sort of embarrassment, you know, the type that gives hint that the Church is economically entrenched. My father was a French-polisher, and I know that he was far more genuinely shocked by a hint of the Church’s wealth than he was by a dozen apostasies. Of course, there are still people who feel that way, who imagine that an archdiocese can be run without revenue, where an oil company can’t.’
Maitland could see Nolan, in attendance, halfway up the corridor. Not wishing to have the president miss the next sentence, he raised his voice.
‘Your Grace,’ he said trembling, ‘is the archdiocese going to back me up by selling its holdings in both those companies?’
There was silence at His Grace’s end, and Nolan had stirred from his shadows like a sentry from a box.
‘My heaven, that’s called turning the flank,’ His Grace decided, not without some hint of approval. ‘However, Mr Boyle, whom I’ve been speaking to, assures me that the companies are respectable and in no way depart from the norms of the business world.’
‘Your Grace, have you seen the way they advertise in the evening papers?’
‘I don’t read the evening papers. I have no interest in football or scatology.’
Maitland closed his eyes, flying blind. He knew that as far as His Grace was concerned he had no right … He said, ‘I know I have no right, but if you could judge their claims by your own standards. If you could make a comparison of what these people say will happen to a buyer with what does happen to a buyer …’
He heard a flurry of sighs from the prelate.
‘James, if I’d known you were attacking an established company, no fly-by-nighter, I would have been as angry on Monday as I am now.’
‘I see, Your Grace.’
‘The approved list of sermons exists precisely to safeguard young fellows like you from this very mistake. I’d be grateful if from now on you kept to it.’
Maitland swallowed; there seemed to be a spur of dry bone at the base of his throat.
‘Is that your command, Your Grace?’
After a silence, His Grace said in a voice that seemed to have been honed to a point. ‘I want you to do it willingly.’
‘Very well.’ But Maitland remembered, at that moment, the lawyer who had known Joe’s contract by heart. ‘Your Grace, there’s a lawyer …’
His Grace grudgingly took the lawyer’s name.
The conversation finished; Nolan came near again. The unwelcome pity which bent his shoulder and made him obsequious as nurses are obsequious with the fantastically maimed, began to wake Maitland’s anger again.
‘James,’ said the president sentimentally, ‘I still have great faith in your future. Don’t try to set the world on fire, though, that’s my advice. We are expected to be men of the world.’ The head wagged, and the scalp and ancient hairstyle caught light from the corridor and mocked the man. ‘Our congregations don’t expect violent social messages. We don’t live in that sort of country. The Church is respected and has good standing without recourse to any of that sort of thing. That’s why I recommended the approved list – and you mustn’t resent my doing so. One can’t very well open one’s mouth too far by adhering to the list. Anyhow, it’s cold here. Come upstairs.’
On the stairs, Nolan’s shoulders shivered. There was damp on the walls of the stairwell, damp enough to take glints from the lighted bottom landing. What it all threatened to the older, in fact, the old man, was croup, lumbago, neuralgia, rheumatism. If he had been a public servant he would have been retired by now, angrily scooping cut-worm out of his top-soiled lawn.
He turned to Maitland as they reached the first-floor landing. ‘Could I give you some advice?’ he asked with a hint of timidity.
‘Of course.’
‘Actually it’s brief. You can’t overdo orthodoxy. Conformity’s a word people use a lot. Well, you can’t overdo conformity when what you’re conforming to is Christ’s Vicar on earth. Now I see – and once more I’m sure you won’t be pained – I see your (could we say?) radical attitude, your article on Luther, for example, and this disconcerting situation as connected. I don’t think this would have happened if it hadn’t been for your earlier recklessness.’
‘I don’t think it would have happened if the Church had been more careful about whose dirty money it accepted.’
Nolan shrugged. ‘Oh well, if you’re going to talk heedless rot …’
Maitland hastened to say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m vindictive, I suppose.’ His motive was that he played an incompatible Laertes to Nolan’s Polonius and didn’t want to hear any more.
‘That’s the third time you’ve been vindictive, James.’ The president had a memory for such things. ‘First, over those cousins of yours; secondly, over that Martin Luther article. I have some authority in this house, you know, and I’m getting tired of being paternal.’
‘I think I’d better simply apologize and go and do some work.’
‘Very well. Just let me say before you go –’
Maitland was in a panic of virulence. ‘I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Good night.’
In Maitland’s room, Egan sat amid the clutter, not seeming at all alien to it. The Observer was in his hands and he had some undisclosed reason for gaiety – perhaps some decision regarding La Belle Tully. Standing up, he said, ‘A person misses out on some damned good films, eh?’
Maitland smiled dutifully. ‘I don’t feel as guilty reading about films as I do going to see them.’
‘That’s right. Especially when the bedroom scenes come on. You can feel people observing you – I can anyhow – and wondering what in the name of heaven you know about that sort of thing.’
‘Or musing on the orgies we traditionally have every second Monday with nuns.’
‘Or on priests’ women,’ Egan suddenly said against himself and hung his head.
‘Rubbish!’ Maitland told him. ‘Besides, thou canst not have thy funeral tonight, Maurice lad, it being my turn in the graveyard.’
All the time, Maitland exulted because Egan was there. Having a friend and knowing it went far towards filling his sparse needs.
‘I came to see you about that,’ Egan admitted. ‘Would you like me to write to this rag saying that I uphold all your remarks?’
Maitland, not used to either greeting or having supporters, asked too gratefully, ‘Do you have something against these development people?’
‘My dear James, I wouldn’t know an acre from a rod, pole or perch.’
‘Then why …? Not that you could involve yourself anyway. Not an official of the chancery.’
‘I trust your judgment, James. If you say these people are execrable, they are.’
Nor was Maitland accustomed to having his judgment fêted. In carnival mood, he sat down to brew coffee for his friend.
On the following Monday, His Grace telephoned him once more and said, ‘I’ve sought advice, James.’ He kept on interrupting himself with short hacks of coughing and Maitland missed parts of sentences as the prelatial cold rumbled down the wires. ‘… consulted that lawyer fellow … meeting of the trustees and diocesan counsellors for tomorrow afternoon. I can take it for granted we’ll be getting rid of that stock.’
11
SO THAT THE next morning Maitland was firmly persona grata again. He was glad. To live in that grey elephant of a house on any other terms would have been a test of sanity he did not wish to undergo. Yet his success had its blemishes, as when Costello bombarded him with applause. Nolan, having carried so funereal a face on the question, kept clear. It was not unti
l two mornings later, himself and Maitland passing vested for Mass and bearing chalices in the corridor behind the high altar, that Nolan smiled with an aged wistfulness and whispered, ‘So you talked His Grace round to your view of things.’
During that brief springtime when Maitland seemed to bear His Grace’s cachet, Costello came to him a second time and said, ‘It seems there’s a nun in St Thomasine’s College – that’s across the city. She’s apparently a little unorthodox, but the mother-superior has tended to be tolerant of her. However, two parents have complained now, and mother is shaken. His Grace is so far on your side over this other matter that he wants you to be one of the three members of a sort of informal inquiry.’
Maitland, caught in his shirtsleeves and in contemplative mood, said, ‘I’m not a good inquisitor.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll be there. I’ve done this sort of thing before. You just sit back and look as magisterial as all get-out and learn the ropes.’
Moored on a hill against a high wind and vibrant south-easting clouds, St Thomasine’s was neither as huge nor as Thomas Love Peacock as the House of Studies, yet fit to make hysterical any girl returning from summer holidays. Down to the last digit on its crass garden statuary, it seemed exemplary, the last place to harbour a radical nun. Inside was the browning winter light of institutions, waiting for them in the parlour like something they had been unsuccessful at leaving at home. Also waiting were Monsignor Fleming, the third member of the committee, and the mother-superior. Both were young sixty-year-olds. Their serge clothing lapped them about in unchallengeable snugness as they spoke of the signs of decline, angina and gall and kidneys, in old nuns and priests known to both of them. Introductions over, the mother-superior began to present the dossier on Sister Martin, the danger. She asked them to sit at the head of the table so that the thing would look judicial. She said reluctantly that she thought it had come to that.
Three Cheers for the Paraclete Page 14