But the most powerful among these are the housekeepers of bishops. Nellie Conneely, the Bishop of Moyle’s housekeeper, had been with him since he was a canon, and even in those days he had been referred to by his parishioners as ‘Nellie and the Canon’. ‘Nellie and the Canon’ didn’t approve of all-night dances, so all-night dances were stopped. Half the population depended for patronage on ‘Nellie and the Canon’, and presents were encouraged – food for the Canon and something a little perishable for Nellie. The townspeople had no doubt as to which was the more important partner. She had even appeared on the altar steps on one occasion and announced that there would be no eight o’clock Mass because she was keeping the Canon in bed. She was a comparatively young woman for such a responsible position, and even at the time I speak of she was a well-preserved little body, with a fussy, humble, sugary air that concealed a cold intelligence. Her great rival was Canon Lanigan, who was the favourite in the succession of the diocese. In private he sniggered over her and called her La Maintenon, but when he visited the Bishop he was as sugary as herself and paid her flowery compliments on her cooking and even on her detestable bottled coffee. But Nellie, though she giggled and gushed in response, wasn’t in the least taken in; she knew Lanigan preferred old French mishmash to her own candid cooking, and she warned the Bishop not to trust him. ‘God forgive me,’ she said sadly, ‘I don’t know how it is I can’t warm to Canon Lanigan. There is something about him that is not quite sincere. I know, of course, that I’m only a foolish old woman, and you don’t have to mind me.’
But the Bishop had to mind her and he did. The poor man had one great fear, which was that he was fading away for lack of proper nourishment. He knew what the old-fashioned clerics were like, with their classical scholarship and their enormous appetites, and, comparing his own accomplishments and theirs, he couldn’t see for the life of him how he was ever going to reach ninety. After eating a whole chicken for his dinner, he would sit in his study for hours, wondering what the connection was between serious scholarship and proper meals, till Nellie thrust her head in the door.
‘You’re all right?’ she would ask coyly.
‘I’m not, Nellie,’ he would reply with a worried air. ‘I’m feeling a bit low tonight.’
‘’Tis that chicken!’ she would cry, making a dramatic entrance. ‘I knew it. I said it to Tim Murphy. There wasn’t a pick on it.’
‘I was wondering about that myself,’ he would say, fixing her with his anxious blue eyes. ‘Murphy’s chickens don’t seem to be the same at all.’
‘What you want is a nice grilled chop,’ she would say authoritatively.
‘I don’t know,’ he would mutter, measuring his idea of a chop against his idea of night starvation. ‘There’s a lot of eating in a chop.’
‘Well, you could have cutlets,’ she would say with a shrug, implying that she didn’t think much of cutlets for a bad case like his own.
‘Cutlets make a nice snack,’ he agreed.
‘Ah, they do, but they’re too dry,’ she would cry, waving them away in disgust. ‘What you want is a good plate of nice curly rashers, with lots of fat on them. ’Twas my own fault. I knew there was nothing in that chicken. I should have served them with the chicken, but I declare to you my wits are wandering. I’m getting too old … And a couple of chips. Sure, ’twill be the making of you.’
One day, Nellie came in terrible trouble to the Bishop. She had just been visited by one of the local customs officers, Tim Leary. The Bishop’s diocese was on the border between Northern and Southern Ireland, and since there was never a time when something that was plentiful on one side wasn’t scarce on the other, there was constant smuggling in both directions. The South sent butter, eggs, ham and whiskey to the North, and the North sent back petrol, tea and sugar – all without benefit of duty. The customs officials of the two countries worked together in their efforts to prevent it. Nellie seemed to have the greatest difficulty in explaining to the Bishop what Tim Leary wanted of her. You’d have thought she was not bright in the head.
‘You said it yourself,’ she said ingenuously. ‘This diocese was ever notorious for backbiting, but why do they pick on me? I suppose they want to have their own housekeeper, someone that would do their whispering for them. It is something I never would do, not even for your sake, and I will not do it for them, even if they do say you’re too old.’
‘Who says I’m too old?’ the Bishop asked mildly, but his blue eyes had an angry light in them. He knew the people who would say such things, and there were plenty of them.
‘Don’t, don’t ask me to carry stories!’ she begged, almost in frenzy. ‘I won’t do it, even to save my life. Let Canon Lanigan and the rest of them say what they like about me.’
‘Never mind Canon Lanigan,’ the Bishop said shortly. ‘What did Leary say about you?’
‘But what could he say about me? What have he against me only old doorsha-dawrsha he picked up in the low public houses of the town? Oh, ’tisn’t that at all, me lord, but the questions he asked me. They put the heart across me. “Who was the chief smuggler?” – wasn’t that a nice thing for him to ask me?’
‘He thought you knew the chief smuggler?’ the Bishop asked incredulously.
‘He thought I was the chief smuggler,’ she replied with her hand to her heart. ‘He didn’t say it, but I could read it in that mean little mind of his. Whiskey, petrol, tea, and things, my lord, that I declare to you and to my Maker, if I was to go before Him at this minute of time, I never even knew the names of.’
‘He must be mad,’ the Bishop said with a worried air. ‘Which Learys is he belonged to? The ones from Clooneavullen?’ The Bishop had a notion that most of the mysteries of human conduct could be solved by reference to heredity. He said he had never yet met a good man who came from a bad family.
‘Aha!’ Nellie cried triumphantly. ‘Didn’t I say it myself? That his own father couldn’t read or write, and the joke of the countryside for his foolish talk!’
‘Never mind his father,’ the Bishop said sternly. ‘He had an uncle in the lunatic asylum. All that family were touched. Tell him to come up here to me tomorrow, and I’ll give him a bit of my mind.’
‘You will to be sure, my lord,’ she said complacently as she rose. Then at the door she stopped. ‘But why would you talk to a little whippersnapper like that – a man like you, that has the ear of the government? I suppose someone put him up to it.’
The Bishop meditated on that for a moment. He saw Nellie’s point about the impropriety of people’s going over his head, and recognised that it might be the work of an enemy. Like Nellie, he knew the secrets of power and understood that the most important is never to deal directly with people you look down on.
‘Give me my pen!’ he said at last in a voice that made Nellie’s heart flutter again. When some parish priest had been seen drunk in a public place, the Bishop would say in the same dry voice to his secretary, ‘Give me my pen till I suspend Father Tom’, or when some gang of wild young curates had started a card club in some remote village, ‘Give me my pen till I scatter them!’ It was the voice of ultimate authority, of the Church Militant personified in her own dear, simple man.
In spite of strenuous detective work, Nellie never did get to see the Bishop’s letter to his friend in the government, Seumas Butcher, the Irish Minister of Revenue, but, on the other hand, neither did the Bishop ever get to see the Minister’s reply. It was one of the features of Nellie’s concern for him that she did not like him to know of anything that would upset his health, and she merely removed such letters from the hall. But even she had never seen a letter so likely to upset the Bishop as that from the Minister:
Dear Dr Gallogly:
It was a real pleasure to hear from you again. Mrs Butcher was only saying a week ago that it was ages since you paid us a visit. I have had careful inquiries made about the matter you mention, and I am very sorry indeed to inform you that the statements of the local Revenue Officer appear to
be fully substantiated. Your housekeeper, Miss Ellen Conneely, is the owner of licensed premises at the other side of the Border which have long been known as the headquarters of a considerable smuggling organisation, whose base on this side appears to be the Episcopal Palace. You will realise that the Revenue Officers have no desire to take any steps that could be an embarrassment to you, but you will also appreciate that this traffic involves a considerable loss of revenue for both our country and the North of Ireland, and might, in the event of other gangs operating in the neighbourhood being tried and convicted, result in serious charges. I should be deeply grateful for Your Lordship’s kind assistance in putting an early end to it.
Mise le meas
Seumas O. Buitseir
Aire
Nellie fully understood, when she had read this, the tone with which the Bishop said ‘Give me my pen’, as a father might say ‘Give me my stick.’ There were certain matters that could only be dealt with by a pen like a razor, and that evening she sat in her own room and wrote:
Dear Sir:
His Lordship, the Most Reverend Dr Gallogly, Bishop of Moyle, has handed me your letter of the 3rd inst. and asked me to reply to it on his behalf. He says it is a tissue of lies and that he does not want to be bothered any more with it. I suppose His Lordship would not know what is going on in his own house? Or is it a rogue and robber you think he is? I do not know how you can have the face to say such things to a bishop. All those lies were started by Tim Leary, and as His Lordship says, what better could you expect of a man whose uncle died in the Moyle Asylum, a wet and dirty case? The public house you talk about is only another of the lies. It does not belong to me at all but to my poor brother who, after long years of suffering for Ireland in English prisons, is now an incurable invalid with varicose veins and six children. How would the likes of him be a smuggler? Tim Leary will be thrown out if he calls here again. It is all lies. Did Tim Leary suffer for Ireland? Has Tim Leary six children? What has happened our Christian principles and what do we pay taxes for? We were better off when we had the English.
Yours sincerely,
Ellen Conneely
There was something about this letter that gave Nellie a real thrill of pride and satisfaction. Like all women of her kind, she had always had the secret desire to speak out boldly with the whole authority of the Church behind her, and now she had done it.
She had also illustrated to perfection the Achilles’ heel of Catholicism, because, though Dr Gallogly would probably have had a heart attack if he had known the contents of her letter, no layman could be quite sure of this, and the Minister and his staff were left with a vague impression that, somehow or other, the Bishop of Moyle was now the ringleader of a smuggling gang. Being all of them good Catholics, they took the charitable view that the Bishop was no longer responsible for his actions and had taken to smuggling the way some old men take to other peculiar pursuits, but all the same it was a nasty situation. Whatever happened, you could not raid the palace for contraband. The very thought of what the newspapers would say about this made the Minister sick. The Irish Times would report it in full, with a smug suggestion that Protestant bishops never did things like that; the Irish Independent would assert that instructions for the raid had come direct from Moscow, through the local Communist cell; while the Irish Press would say, without fear of contradiction, that it was another British plot against the good name of Irishmen.
‘Jesus, Joe!’ the Minister said, with a moan, to his secretary. ‘Forget it! Forget it, if you can!’
But the local customs officers could not forget it. Nellie didn’t allow them. Scared by Tim Leary and the Minister’s letter, she worked openly and feverishly to get rid of all the contraband in her possession, and the professional pride of the customs officers was mortified. Then, one day, a man was caught trying to cross the border into the North with a keg of whiskey under the seat of his car, and he swore by God and the Twelve Apostles that he had no notion how it had got there. But Tim Leary, who knew the man’s friendship with Nellie, knew damn well how it had got there, and went to Paddy Clancy’s liquor store in Moyle, from which it had originally come. Paddy, a crushed and quivering poor man, had to admit that the keg had been sold to the Bishop.
‘Get me the Bishop’s account, Paddy,’ Tim said stiffly, and poor Paddy produced the ledger. It was an ugly moment, because Paddy was a man who made a point of never interfering with any man’s business but he knew of old that the Bishop’s liquor account was most peculiar. Tim Leary studied it in stupefaction.
‘Honour of God!’ he said angrily. ‘Are you trying to tell me that the Bishop drinks all that?’
‘Bishops have a lot of entertaining to do, Tim,’ Paddy said meekly.
‘Bishops don’t have to have a bloody bonded store to entertain in!’ shouted Tim.
‘Well, Tim, ’tis a delicate matter,’ Paddy said, sweating with anxiety. ‘If a man is to have customers in this country, he cannot afford to ask questions.’
‘Well, begod, I’m going to ask a few questions,’ cried Tim, ‘and I’m going to do it this very morning, what’s more. Give me that ledger!’
Then, with the ledger under his arm, he went straight up to the palace. Nellie tried to head him off. First she said the Bishop was out; then she said the Bishop was ill; finally she said that the Bishop had given orders that Tim was not to be admitted.
‘You try to stop me, Nellie, and I’ll damn soon show you whether I’m going to be admitted or not,’ said Tim, pushing past her, and at that moment the study door opened and the Bishop came out. It was no coincidence, and at that moment Nellie knew she was lost, for along with the appetite of a child, the Bishop had the curiosity of a child, and a beggar’s voice at the door would be sufficient for him to get up and leave the door of his study ajar so that he could listen in comfort to the conversation.
‘That will do, Nellie,’ he said, and then came up to Tim with a menacing air – a handsome old man of six foot two, with a baby complexion and fierce blue eyes.
‘What do you want?’ he asked sternly, but on his own ground Tim could be as infallible as any bishop.
‘I’m investigating the smuggling that’s going on in this locality, and I want to ask you a few questions, my lord,’ he replied grimly.
‘So I heard,’ said the Bishop. ‘I told the Minister already I couldn’t see why you had to do your investigating in my house.’
‘I’m a public servant, my lord,’ Tim said, his voice rising, ‘and I’m entitled to make my investigations wherever I have to.’
‘You’re a very independent young man,’ the Bishop said dryly but without rancour. ‘Tell me, are you John Leary’s son from Clooneavullen?’
‘I’m nothing of the sort. Who said I was John Leary’s son? My father was from Manister.’
‘For God’s sake!’ the Bishop said softly. ‘You’re not Jim Leary’s boy, by any chance?’
‘I am, then,’ said Tim with a shrug.
‘Come on in,’ the Bishop said, holding out his hand to Tim, while his eyes searched away into the distance beyond the front door. ‘Your father was headmaster there when I was a canon. I must have seen you when you were a little fellow. Come in, anyway. No son of Jim Leary’s is going to leave this house without a drink.’
‘But I’m on duty, my lord,’ said Tim, following him in.
‘Aren’t we all?’ the Bishop asked mildly as he went to the sideboard. ‘I’m as much a bishop now as I’ll ever be.’ With shaky hands he produced two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. He gave one tiny glass to Tim and took another himself. It was obviously a duty rather than a pleasure. The Bishop did not go in for drinking, because it seemed to ruin his appetite and that was bad enough already.
‘Now, tell me what all this is about,’ he said comfortably.
Tim was beginning to realise that he really liked the man – an old weakness of his, which, combined with his violent temper, made him a bad investigator. He sometimes thought the bad temper and the good
nature were only two aspects of the same thing.
‘A man was caught trying to cross the Border a few days ago with a keg of your whiskey in his car,’ he said as firmly as he could.
‘A keg of my whiskey?’ the Bishop repeated with real interest and apparent enjoyment. ‘But what would I be doing with a keg of whiskey?’
‘That’s what I came to ask you,’ replied Tim. ‘You seem to have bought enough of them in the past year.’
‘I never bought a keg of whiskey in my whole life, boy,’ said the Bishop with amusement. ‘Sure, if I take a drop of punch before I go to bed, that’s all the whiskey I ever see. It’s bad for a man of my age,’ he added earnestly. ‘I haven’t the constitution.’
‘If you’ll take one look at your account in Clancy’s ledger, you’ll see you’re supposed to have an iron constitution,’ said Tim and, as he opened the book, there was a knock and Nellie came in modestly with a bundle of receipted bills in her hand. ‘Or maybe this is the one with the iron constitution,’ Tim added fiercely. He still had not forgotten his unmannerly reception.
‘You need say no more,’ she said briskly. ‘I admit it, whatever little harm I did to anyone. ’Twas only to keep my unfortunate angashore of a brother out of the workhouse. Between drinking and politics, he was never much head to his poor wife, God rest her. Not one penny did I ever make out of it, and not one penny of His Lordship’s money ever went astray. I’ll go if I have to, but I will not leave this house without a character.’
‘I’ll give you the character,’ Tim said savagely. ‘And furthermore I’ll see you have a place to go. You can do all the smuggling you like there – if you’re able.’
‘That will do!’ the Bishop said sternly. ‘Go away, Nellie!’ he added over his shoulder, in the tone he used when he asked for his pen to suspend Father Tom.
Nellie looked at him for a moment in stupefaction and then burst into a howl of grief and went out, sobbing to herself about ‘the fifteen good years of my life that I wasted on him and there’s his gratitude’. The Bishop waited imperturbably till her sobs had subsided in the kitchen before he spoke again.
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