‘The deceased’, he said, ‘would have been in no fit condition to drive.’
‘Lies and slander,’ Gulban shouted, as he strode out of the room.
Pauline and Forker were recalled to give further evidence. They both stuck to their stories. Then the coroner summed up. She wept as she heard the verdict of death by misadventure.
As soon as she got home, Gulban summoned her to his room.
‘How much did he have to drink?’ he asked.
‘As far as I know, half a bottle of wine and two small whiskies.’
‘That isn’t three times the limit.’
‘I know.’
‘Was he a secret drinker, then? Did he have a drink on his own before you left?’
‘He didn’t look as if he’d been drinking.’
‘I knew he took a drink from time to time but I never let on. I often got the smell of whiskey off his breath in the middle of the morning. Maybe he had a drink on the sly to screw up his courage before proposing.’
‘We understood each other perfectly. There was no need for that.’
‘You can tell the truth, I can take it. Was he a secret drinker?’
‘He was fond of a drink but no one ever saw him drunk.’
‘Maybe he had decided to blow a few fivers of his talent.’
‘He was a serious man. That was not in his nature.’
‘Pauline, you make me feel ashamed. I always had faith in him, I mustn’t lose it now.’
That was the real inquest, she told herself as she returned to her room. Or was it just the first session of the real inquest?
The following morning Gulban didn’t come down to breakfast. When she went to his room, she found him lying on top of the bedclothes, staring vacantly at the blank ceiling. There was a half-empty whiskey bottle on the table and a broken glass on the floor. She thought he was drunk, so she called Cookie. Cookie slapped his cheeks and smelt his breath. Then Joey came in. He lifted Gulban’s right hand and let it drop. Then he did the same with the left.
‘We must call the doctor,’ he said. ‘Gulban has had a stroke.’
Chapter 7
They entered Gulban’s office and drew their chairs round the heavy mahogany table, Joey at one end, Cookie at the other and Father Bosco facing Gulban’s empty chair in the middle. It was the first time they had met in his room without being summoned. Father Bosco lit one of his small cigars and Joey went to the bar for an ashtray and a round of drinks.
‘He’s on the mend,’ Father Bosco said, pushing aside the drink that Joey had poured him. ‘We must face facts, however. Gulban will never be the same again. Now all we can do is ensure that he ends his life with dignity and in peace. He will never run the business again, the doctor said as much.’
‘He will want to run it,’ Joey said. ‘In his present state he will be a greater nuisance than ever.’
‘Then we must bear with him, if only for our own internal peace. As man and priest, I know that there are sins which no absolution can obliterate. The sin of disloyalty is one of them. My first parish priest was an old man called Father Tourish. He was so forgetful that he used to leave out parts of the Mass on Sunday, which may have suited some of his parishioners but not all. One of them, a bank manager’s wife, complained to the bishop, and the bishop asked me as curate for my opinion. I considered it my duty to tell the truth, and Father Tourish was made to retire. He went into a home for old priests run by nuns and never did a day’s good afterwards. Now he’s ending his life in an indignity of outré sexual fantasy, and for that I shall never forgive myself. God has forgiven me, I’m sure, but His forgiveness has only rubbed salt in the wound. In telling the truth I pronounced a sentence I can never unsay. So we must not be too self-righteous. We must create for our father an atmosphere of love and sympathy. We must shield him from the worst indignities of old age.’
‘How do we do that?’ Joey put on a face of extreme innocence.
‘We must listen with respect to what he has to say. We must say “yes” even when our intelligence may prompt us to say “no”.’
‘Oh son, help your father in his old age … even if he is lacking in understanding show forbearance … for kindness to a father will not be forgotten … in the day of your affliction it will be remembered in your favour,’ Cookie intoned.
‘Are you asking us to deny the truth?’ Joey turned to Father Bosco.
‘Truth is eternal. Though you may put it in abeyance for an hour or two, the divine tide will still come in and wash all falsehood away.’
‘I’ve never seen Gulban as a shorn lamb to whom we must temper the wind,’ Cookie said. ‘I doubt if he’d thank you for that kind of compassion.’
‘I’ll bet you’re lenient in confession, Father. I must avail of your services some time,’ Joey smiled.
‘If there’s any change in him, ring me. He isn’t the only sick person on my list. I have arranged to visit four more before nightfall.’
From the window they watched him drive off in his trusted Fiat, the brim of his black hat resting on his ears.
‘Professionalism is a great killer of spontaneity,’ Joey said. ‘Bosco is a professional. To him one sick man is as good as another. They all provide occasions for performing corporal works of mercy.’
‘You noticed that none of us sat in Gulban’s chair,’ Cookie said.
‘I noticed that Bosco faced it as if it were the seat of judgment.’
‘It was an eerie feeling, sitting round his table drinking his whiskey and not censoring our speech. Now we have some idea of what it will be like when he’s gone. We’ll stretch our legs, breathe freely, and be ourselves.’
‘We’ll have to be serious in front of the staff, provide the centre of gravity, think of that! Aren’t you just a little bit afraid, Cookie?’
‘No, are you?’
‘The only thing I’m afraid of is that Gulban may die intestate. He hadn’t made a will on the Day of the Talents, and he hasn’t made one since.’
‘Will he ever again be in a fit condition to make a will?’
‘If he dies intestate, the estate will be split three ways. The Holy Man will receive his share.’
‘Bosco is right,’ said Cookie. ‘We must look after Gulban. Lying alone up there in his room, he could get all sorts of strange ideas in his head.’
Father Bosco drove quickly, as if trying to shake off a persistent pursuer. What pursued him, though, was irritation at the thought of Cookie and Joey drinking Gulban’s whiskey in Gulban’s room without a sign of filial respect – or respect for the priesthood, come to that.
Jack had been rooted in the ground and so was Gulban. Cookie and Joey were suckers on a rose bush, consumers not providers, fancy talkers rather than hard grafters. Joey was the younger but still he was the leader. In conversation he invented the ideas; he made the balls which Cookie then rolled for his brother’s amusement rather than his own. Joey was a cynic without feeling for God or man. Cookie probably had some feelings, but in Joey’s company he took care to conceal them. He was handicapped by his determination to consider one possibility as valid as the next. He probably had a literary phrase for it. All it meant was that though he’d got a first at university he’d get a third in life. Neither he nor Joey realised that the House of Heron had changed for ever. All they knew was the past which was Gulban’s creation. They didn’t truly believe in the present, their present, and they lacked the stomach to fashion the future. What would become of the shop, the farm and the hotel under their uneasy duumvirate was not for a charitable man to say.
He himself, he would admit, was not beyond censure. At one time he had imagined himself as staunch and as firm as Gulban and Jack. Now he wondered if he had both feet on the deck – or in the sanctuary, come to that. Today he had experienced a lack of solidity in his life that reminded him of his sense of shock when Benedict McBride left the seminary at short notice. Was it lack of solidity that had led him into the priesthood in the first place, the worry of skating over
thin ice without a skater’s light-footedness? But he must not question his vocation now, just because he’d had a momentary experience of insecurity and flux. ‘Insecurity’ and ‘flux’ were grand words – what Cookie would call euphemisms and Joey would translate as ‘sexual distress’, if he knew.
Yet it was all so innocent and accidental. He and Pauline had been sitting at Gulban’s bedside and he had glimpsed the inside of her left knee. If he’d seen her bathing naked, as the elders had seen Susanna, he wouldn’t have given the matter a second thought. What happened was that she uncrossed her legs, and in the moment of seeing he had looked away. It was preposterous to be over thirty and have your peace of mind shattered by the glimpse of a knee. What, after all, was a knee? A not-so-pretty bone which anatomists called the patella, with a little hollow on one side. It had the shape of a convex sea shell and its function presumably was to protect the knee-joint in front. Sadly, such scientific knowledge was mere thistledown before the wind of emotional compulsion. If he’d been moved by a look of sexual complicity in her eyes or by the bare nape of her neck as she bent forward, he would have understood. But a knee was only a knee. Or was it? In his heart he knew that it was not the convex bone but the concave hollow in the flesh beside it that caused him to look away. Yet nothing tangible had happened. There was no physical contact, no touch of hand or brush of arms. In that moment of shock not even their eyes had met. She had kept up a quietly intelligent flow of conversation, utterly unaware of the thunderstorm in his blood. ‘Thunderstorm’ was perhaps an exaggeration; it was more like a tumult that quickened the circulation, causing a disquiet that refused to subside.
After five minutes he left the room and ambled – or pretended to amble – down to the slip to watch the boats and the water. Again and again he counted the creosoted skids embedded in the firm concrete, as if he could not believe that there were twenty-nine, not thirty. He walked up and down the concrete, treading carefully, and he pulled on a heavy cable with the determination of a man who is convinced that pulling will break it. He walked back to the hotel, not quite weak but a trifle shaky, empty inside as if he’d fasted for twenty-four hours. He went to the kitchens and asked one of the girls to make him a salad sandwich.
‘White or brown bread?’ she asked.
He thought for a moment. It was an incomprehensible question which required careful consideration.
‘The wholemeal is best, Father. It’s fresh in this morning.’
‘I’ll have the white, then. If it’s stale, it will serve as penance.’
He chewed slowly, trying to concentrate on the mushy tomato, crisp lettuce and cool cucumber between the slices. Then, in suppressed rage, he got up and dropped the half-eaten sandwich into the rubbish bin.
‘I’ll make you another with wholemeal bread,’ the girl said.
‘No, thank you.’
The solid world had become a gleety liquid. He was suffocating in a sea of floating garbage. He ran into Cookie and Joey in the lobby, and later when Joey poured him a whiskey, he declined for fear it might inflame his omnivorous imagination.
‘It’s nothing,’ he told himself, swinging through the parochial house gates. ‘What overwhelmed me was the immediacy of the experience, which made my life in the seminary and now as a curate seem like a kind of insentient stupor. It’s the reality of the moment as opposed to the reality of eternity. I am as yet unable to think in eternities, I must learn at least to think in centuries. It is the way to spiritual serenity and freedom from personal necessity.’
Canon Sproule, his parish priest, was walking back and forth in the driveway, his hands joined behind his back through the slit-pockets of his cassock. The cassock was pulled backwards over the curve of his belly, and the toecaps of his shoes were turning up from years of kneeling and genuflecting. His high head was covered on top with a snowfall of sleek, thin hair that neither required nor received frequent combing. He was a happy, humorous man who loved his food, his pipe and genial conversation in the evening.
‘And how is he today?’ he asked.
‘Same as yesterday.’
‘I remembered him in the prayers for the living this morning. Are you free by any chance later on? I thought we might have a game of Scrabble.’
‘First I have to make one or two sick calls. After that I was planning an evening of spiritual reading.’
‘Who is it this time? St John of the Cross again?’
‘I don’t know yet. I have a little theological problem, Canon. Nothing serious. I thought an evening of contemplation might do the trick. I’m not an original thinker. I need St Augustine or St Jerome to point me in the right direction.’
‘A theological problem? Do I know her?’ The old priest threw back his head and laughed.
‘Only too well. She’s called the problem of original sin.’
‘You should give up those short cigars, they’re enough to make any man nervous. Get yourself a pipe and experience a change of culture, maybe a change of vision. As a man grows older, theological problems may provide exercise for the intellect but they fail to stir the cooling blood.’
They both laughed. Bosco went to his room to shave. He had a belief that shaving was an act of purification which, if performed with care and deliberation, could change the complexion of the mind itself. He liked exchanging pleasantries with the Canon. He loved him for his certainty and his humorous dismissal of all things that might threaten it. He was full of worldly wisdom, not all of it expressed in theological jargon.
‘Priests are subject to the most subtle temptations,’ he would say. ‘The urges of the flesh they experience would hardly register with the more carnal of the laity. As an old archdeacon I once knew used to put it, “The devil finds work for idle cocks.” Then he would laugh gleefully at his own joke. It was a daring joke for a clergyman. He had often made it before. He liked nothing better than making it again.
His psychoactive ablutions complete, Father Bosco knelt at his prie-dieu and spoke to the blank wall in front of him.
‘I have achieved chastity of deed. What I have yet to find is chastity of thought. But nothing further will happen. That I guarantee. What occurred once in the past belongs in the life of a different man. What occurred today is humiliating because it is incomprehensible. It’s an extra pain to be borne. It’s a pain I could have done without. I shall go back to see my father tomorrow, and there I shall meet Pauline. I mustn’t try to avoid her because that would only fire my imagination. I realise now that I am safest in her company, because she is rational, serious and matter-of-fact.’
Chapter 8
Joey looked forward to Sunday mornings, especially in summer. The shop was less busy than on weekdays, so he could leave the two girls who worked for him to look after the odd customer who came in for sweets, newspapers or cigarettes, the only things that seemed to sell on Sundays.
The hotel bars opened from half-past twelve till two. It was now almost noon and he was enjoying a solitary drink in the lounge before the thirsty hordes came in. He had locked the doors against wandering guests. He was sitting by a window with his back to the sunlight and the unread Sunday papers strewn over the low table before him.
The lounge was spacious and airy with tall windows facing south. The brown tweed curtains had been chosen by Pauline to match the corded upholstery of the seats. The agricultural and household implements that hung from the walls and ceiling had been collected by Jack to provide a topic of conversation for bored tourists with a passing interest in rural folkways. There was an old scythe, a sickle, a pair of sheep shears, a sand-eel hook, a turf-spade, a churn-dash, a thraw-hook for twisting hay-ropes, a triangle of salmon net and an old-style lobster-pot. Needless to say, there were no such embellishments in the public bar where the locals drank. The locals came to the hotel to escape the very life that the lounge bar sought to celebrate.
Joey was thinking about how to invest his money, which was at present with a building society, earning little more than it would have done
in a bank. He wondered what Cookie had done with his, because Cookie was hardly the kind of man who made regular killings on the stock exchange. He was incredibly ignorant of business, science, and the normal processes of rational thought. He once introduced Joey to a French professor of chemistry, who was staying at the hotel, as ‘our resident stinks man’, though Joey’s true interest was geology, and the rock specimens he collected could scarcely be described as odoriferous.
‘I have an advantage over both Bosco and Cookie,’ he said to himself. ‘What they fail to realise is that the world can be reduced to “Mechanick practises”; that God, if he existed, would be a scientist.’
He looked across at the fleeting shadows on the hill, irregular and dark, appearing for a moment and never reappearing in the same shape or place. It was a long, low hill with a dip in the middle that gave it the outline of a pair of human breasts. At its foot was a single stone-built cottage set in a fenced field with a double row of conifers providing shelter from the west. A narrow bog-road ran up past the cottage, ascending the hill in a double curve that looked like an S turned back to front. The road climbed between grey crags and patches of green ferns and purple heather until it vanished over the top in the valley between the great earth-breasts. The house, the field and the hill itself belonged to Old Gildea, whose younger son Slash ran the hotel farm and whose elder son Packie was the village butcher.
Joey sprang from his seat with a sense of purpose that came from sudden inspiration.
‘Eureka!’ he cried, then swallowed what was left of his whiskey. ‘I have made a pact with Cookie but nothing must be left to chance. Gulban has a quirky and original mind. Even in his present state he will appreciate boldness and imagination. He will sit up in bed and say, “Only a scion of the Red Men could have thought of such a thing.”’
The Red Men Page 6