by William King
At Dublin Airport, I pick up the Irish Independent at a newsagent and sit for a moment at the arrivals section to see if there is any mention of the appointment. Banner headlines declare ‘Reynolds in Fresh Row over Passports’. Taking up two columns to the side is a piece headed ‘Engineer Claims Priest had an Affair with his Wife’. Speaking at his home in Galway during the week, the engineer had said that the priest was a gigolo and he was going to sue the Vatican because the priest had been the ruination of his marriage. Jack and the Irish soccer team wave from the steps of a plane on their way to the World Cup in the United States.
I leaf through the pages and then stop. A source close to the diocese has informed this newspaper that the Reverend Dr Patrick Nugent, Professor of Church History at All Saints Seminary, has been appointed to succeed Bishop Boylan, as … I smile. They’ve got it wrong again. You’d think they would check their story. Typical. Always a source close.
Nugent’s picture below the report is the one taken at the Nunciature that first evening of the papal visit. Chomping on a big cigar, Marcinkos had growled that the Holy Father would catch his death of cold in light shoes if he were to walk on the grass ‘of this sodden land’. That night Nugent combs the city, gets every shopkeeper he knows out of bed and is back the following morning with a pair of white galoshes. In one of the parlours of the Papal Nuncio’s residence, Marcinkos removes the tissue paper from the shoe box and bellows into the Dublin archbishop’s ear: ‘Make that man a monsignor this week – before the Holy Father leaves this country. And I ain’t kidding.’
Then I see it. Fr Vincent Lynch of the bishop’s staff confirms the truth of this story and informs us that the official announcement will be made today by the Papal Nuncio at All Saints Seminary. I stare at the page. No. Sure, Bartoli… he’s Boylan’s friend. That nitwit Lynch must have got panicky with the press – that had happened once, while I was in Rome with Boylan. Only two weeks before, the bishops at Maynooth were welcoming me into the fold. All you need now is the rescript, Tom.
They joked. ‘You’ll never be short of a good dinner. But you’ll never again hear a word of truth from your priests.’
I let the paper drop on the seat beside me. Pilots and laughing stewardesses pass by, flirting with each other. Trolleys are pushed over the shining tiles. ‘How was your flight?’ Duty-free plastic bags and hugs. Someone is called to please go to the Aer Lingus information desk. How could Boylan have got it so wrong? And now having to face the priests at All Saints and sit there and watch that little Sicilian runt make the announcement. I want to cry, like the time when, as a small boy, I got seperated from my mother in town, and was lost in a forest of legs.
A man sits down beside me. ‘Is that your paper, Father?’
I look at him.
‘The paper, is it yours?’
‘Yes. Please take it.’
I haul my bags out into the merciless sun. There would have been one more to haul if I had bought episcopal robes at Gammarelli’s.
‘Where to, Father?’ the driver asks when I’m seated in the back of his taxi.
‘What?’
‘Where are youse goin’, Father?’
‘Where am I going?’
He turns round, a baffled look on his face, and I rush in with: ‘Malahide Station please. For the train.’
He switches on the meter and joins the stream of traffic. Once or twice I see him glancing in the mirror.
‘A bit of oul jet lag, Father, wha’?’
‘Jet lag? Oh yes, jet lag.’
On the way to Malahide, he is anxious to talk again: ‘You guys. Priests. Rough station.’
‘Very rough.’
‘Not fair.’
‘No.’
‘The missus gives a dig-out to the local parish priest. I’m … well, you could say, lapsed.’
‘Understandable. Yes, very understandable.’
He answers a call from the crackle and hangs up.
‘Did you know the singin’ priest?’
‘I did.’
‘Did a gig for us one time; fundraiser for the football club. Gas man. All the same, sure ’tis only nature comin’ out, d’you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, I know well. You’re dead right.’ And I wish you would shut up.
With Vinny Lynch at his side, Boylan is slouching in front of All Saints when I arrive at the main gate. Cars are parked on both sides of the avenue, and by the new wing. The football pitch has been opened for the overflow.
‘Sorry, Tommy,’ is all he is able for as we climb the steps. ‘That quisling Bartoli knew – must have – and that’s why he didn’t meet me. I should know better than to trust those wretches in the Curia. So sorry.’ He is shaking his head: ‘You deserved it much more than that cringing acolyte.’
‘Not to worry. You did all you could. Thanks.’
Egan Hall is a blur of clerical black, hoots of laughter and cigar smoke, and the tinkle of glasses when waitresses swerve through the crowd. Standing at the top of the hall, close to a huge oil painting of Judas betraying Jesus, is a group of senior priests with Nugent holding court. He is flanked by two canons of the diocesan chapter; a couple of young priests are pirouetting around them. And, like at a funeral, when people are ill at ease with the bereaved, priests come up to me, and, in a clumsy way, mutter words of consolation: ‘The diocese’s loss,’ then a tap on the shoulder, or a wink. ‘Keep up the heart, Tom.’ One man who runs a farm in his country parish speaks close to my ear: ‘They’d sell their own mothers.’
‘What?’
‘Them hoors in Rome.’
When I go to congratulate Nugent, the room seems to quieten for a moment. ‘Ad multos annos, Patrick,’ I say, shaking his hand.
‘Many thanks, I look forward to working with you.’
That night, when they have gone and the palazzo is silent, Boylan asks me to join him for a drink, even though when he had stood at the dinner to congratulate Nugent and to wish him every blessing, he was slurring his words. Priests were shifting in their chairs and keeping their heads bowed. With a swaying motion, he walks ahead of me down the corridor to the kitchen. On the table are leftovers: rasher rind on a greasy plate, a tea-stained mug and a milk carton. While I clean off the table, he slams shut the door, removes his Roman collar and stock, and sinks into a chair in front of the big stove. ‘Open it, Tommy,’ he says and jerks his stout hand towards the bottle of single malt. ‘You’ll find the glasses in the press.’
For every tumbler I drink, he is throwing back at least two. He grows silent, and raises his glass. ‘Fill that, Tommy.’ Through his thinning hair the pink head glistens beneath the ceiling lights. ‘A toast to the scholarship boy.’
‘The scholarship boy?’
‘Six miles along the railway track, morning and evening, running barefoot from one sleeper to the next, saving the shoes until I got to the outskirts of town.’ He holds up the whiskey to the light. ‘I had to be first, you see. As soon as the Leaving Cert results came out, The Tribune had it.’ He runs his hand along an imaginary banner headline: ‘Local boy is first in Ireland’. A drunken smile spreads across his tired face. ‘Seduced, Tommy. The scholarship boy is seduced by power and promise: the bones of St Peter buried beneath the basilica, twenty centuries of history, trattoria, purple and brocade. Your teachers become bishops and Cardinals – you see that the way is clear if you play your cards right.’ He finishes off the glass and reaches for the bottle. ‘I could have spoken out against Humanae Vitae, like Curran and others theologians who had balls. I’d seen the terror in women’s eyes when they came for guidance, but I did a Pilate.’ He turns away his head. ‘No. I wanted part of the action, and knew that speaking out was the kiss of death to the mitre.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
A look of contempt on his fat face, he stares at the big range: ‘“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” So Tommy, the bogtrotter knew he was far smarter than the others.’ Nursing t
he tumbler close to his broad chest, he gives a cynical twist to his mouth. ‘“You’ll pass out the big shots, if you keep at the books, son, and I’ll be the proudest woman in the chapel.” My mother, God rest her.’
‘What’s that?’ It has been a long day, and a fog is clouding my brain.
‘She used to say that when the reports came home. First in Latin, first in Greek – the same in Maynooth.’
Boylan, as always when he has consumed most of the bottle, is in full swing. ‘Bad to think too deeply; that’s when the doubts set in or else you turn to this. Nugent – now there’s a man who will never be troubled by doubts.’ He rests the tumbler on the arm of his chair; his head drops. ‘No. I’m afraid the sea of faith has ebbed away from me, Tommy.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I search for a palliative. ‘“There lives more faith in honest doubt,”’ I quote.
‘Yes, but Tennyson was long before Ypres or the Somme or the microchip. No, I started doubting a long time ago. Long time ago in the Infernal City.’ He grins and drains the tumbler.
On his retirement, Boylan moves to a bungalow in Bray, and, at first, gains a new lease of life, controls his drinking and goes back to Homer. Gigli, Caruso and McCormack sing again. After a few months, however, he begins to wander off. On one occasion, a young couple find him trundling aimlessly, in his dressing-gown, close to the sea’s edge. He tells them he is looking for Monsignor Galvin to make out the confirmation list. I get him into a nursing home nearby, and from then on until his death, he keeps asking me if Tom Galvin is doing well as a bishop.
‘Very well. Yes, he’s doing very well.’
‘The son I never had, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Well, you’d better be getting back to your wife.’
‘Right so. See you next week.’
Nugent asks me to continue as vicar-general: I would still deliver the odd lecture here and there, and remain a friend and confidant of the priests. ‘Your experience of the diocese is indispensable,’ he assures me in the selfsame library where I updated Boylan on diocesan events. One of the golfers sums it up while we are waiting to tee off: ‘The old story – better to have you pissing out than pissing in.’ Nugent also brings in Father Henry Plunkett, who had cleared off a huge debt in one of the biggest parishes in the diocese. Within a fortnight of arriving there as parish priest, Plunkett had let go the paid catechist, sacked the sacristan and replaced him with an old nun who was willing to work for a trifle. He then closed down most of the parish groups. ‘Gossipers,’ he called them. ‘Drinking tea and coffee, and wasting heat and electricity in the basement.’
‘My predecessor, God love him, and his advisers, had many talents, but housekeeping wasn’t one of them,’ Nugent tells his classmates the night they present him with a crozier; he boasts that, with Plunkett’s help, he will clear off the diocesan debt in five years.
24
AS HIS WEALTH GROWS, M.J. and Grace grow apart. The children shoot up. Holy Communion, confirmation, and then, suddenly, the girls, Elizabeth and Margot, are at university. Much to his father’s disgust, Charlie is in art school; Matthew is a year away from ordination at Downside Abbey, and Grace is driving down there every Saturday and staying at the guesthouse for Sunday Mass. And, like photos dipped in solution where the features gradually are revealed, echoes of their parents’ manner come to the surface.
Elizabeth, once a thumb-sucking child brushing against her Dad’s knee, walks like him, clears her throat like him and wears her father’s charm when she wants her own way with the board of directors. Margot, my godchild and favourite – who was left with the small change of her parents’ affections – sails into St John’s College, Oxford with straight As. All she learns there, however, is how to drink one gin and tonic after another in dark-panelled pubs.
‘Come over, Tom,’ she phones in desperation one night. ‘I need to talk. You always listen.’
That visit becomes the first of many. In a snug at The Eagle and Child, surrounded by ancient boarded walls and plummy accents debating Shakespeare, American foreign policy, or Thatcher, I try to talk sense, but it falls on deaf ears despite fervent promises. Next week. Next month. The New Year.
One May, during Eights Week, we walk around the honey-stone quad at St John’s where she spells out the feverish course of her life: the hotel rooms with tutors – married and single – some she’d only met in a bar earlier.
‘If you became pregnant ….’
She shrugs.
‘Having a child would change the whole course of your life. You’d be tied down then.’
‘There are other options.’
Afraid of what she has in mind, I hold my tongue. She tosses her golden head, and a young troubled version of Grace walks beside me beneath the archway leading to St Giles Road. ‘Anyway, there’s always the “morning-after”.’
‘Providing you’re sober enough to remember.’
‘Who cares?’ The puffed-out look of the drinker saddens me; I stop preaching and invite her to The Randolf for lunch.
The following September, during a duty-bound week of concerts and galleries with Nugent and Plunkett, I visit her apartment in Bayswater. She has scraped a third-class honours and has got a job with a publishing house off Charing Cross Road.
Everything is fine now, Margot assures me while she rushes around the kitchen, preparing a salad. A man’s jacket hangs over one of the chairs. ‘Yes, everything has worked out fine.’ While we eat out on the terrace, a soft breeze drifts in from the Thames; she drinks one glass of wine after another, and then opens a second bottle. Her hangdog look returns. ‘What’s the use in pretending?’ she cries. Nothing has changed – if anything it has got worse. She had woken one morning after a heavy night’s drinking and had no recollection of where she was, or who she had been with the previous evening.
‘But your Oxford degree, your job ….’
She isn’t listening, but keeps mumbling how she’d be better off dead.
‘Would you think about seeing a doctor – a consultant?’
‘A psychiatrist with a pipe, and glasses perched on his nose who would listen behind a desk and make a diagnosis? Then he’d put me on tranqs or sleepers, and I’d walk the streets of London a smiling imbecile. No, Tom. You remember the rhyme: “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” Nor Margot.’
During the idle times – such as summer holidays – when the papers are short on news, M.J. features once or twice, along with other Irishmen who have made fortunes building up and restoring services to war-torn London. At first the papers applaud his success: he is ‘a down-to-earth Irishman who never lost his native accent’.
Then the tide turns. The cruellest blow comes when a tabloid headlines Margot’s death only two days after I had said her funeral Mass. ‘Irish Millionaire’s Daughter Throws Herself under Train at Paddington’. She had tried to do the same the previous Christmas week, but a man had grabbed her as she lunged towards an incoming train.
To his eternal credit, Nugent goes with me to the funeral. ‘Stay on for as long as you wish,’ he says, when I drive him to Heathrow for his flight back to Dublin. ‘Your brother and his family need you at this tragic time. And if there’s any way I can help, remember to phone.’
After the funeral, M.J. asks me to go with him to the old house in Chiswick, now an office; there he drinks day and night, and raves about Margot, how he has now caused another death by neglect. Then his tormented brain switches to Ardglass. He mutters something about climbing Brandon. And milking cows. ‘They need to be milked, Tommy. We’ll go and do it now.’ Tis getting dark.’
I glance out at the sunny street. ‘Right. First drink the coffee. We’ll do it then.’
‘And we’ll cut the hay in the Mill Field.’
‘Next week, but drink that first.’
He holds the cup like a deranged child, and I manage to calm him until the next fit of crying. ‘Where did I
go wrong?’
‘You didn’t. You did well. Very well.’
‘Money. Fucken money. You make a few bob, and before you know where you are, you’re a junkie. And those poor devils I wronged.’
‘You gave them work.’
‘I’ll make it up to them. I will.’
For three days we hide away in that house, while he lances his guilt, his sadness, his life’s frustrations. And despite my efforts to keep him afloat, he seems to be sinking and is dragging me down too.
‘So much oul sadness in the family. Mossie, and now poor Margot. I hardly know the twins, or Eily and Pauline. And the Da. Boasting one minute about all the money he’d make out of the few hungry calves at the November fair, crying the next minute. “What are you crying about, Da?”, Pauline used to ask him. Do you remember, Tommy?’
‘Too well.’
‘“Yerra, go away girl, sure, I’m not crying at all, something went in my eye.”’
At night, M.J. walks the corridor with a glass of whiskey in his hand, or tramps up and down the stairs, talking to himself. I switch on the light and stare at the ceiling. He is asking questions of me too; more serious than any retreat has ever done: about who I am, or where I am going, or, indeed, how I got into the priesthood.