Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  Poor Father Tim, who was always ready to rejoice in other people’s luck, would have been pleased.

  Was there a risk though, Sean worried, that spiteful talk could hurt sales? How stop it, he wondered? By sending out solicitors’ letters? To whom? Best ask Lynch. Paper was plainly his weapon. Wedged into box-files, it manned the shelves behind him while, smoothed out on the desk, thumb-worn documents, soft with creases, looked ready to split along the folds. Some, no doubt, held the sort of secrets to which lawyers were as privy as priests. The thought wound back to Cronin and to the stacks, not of paper but of crisply porous pancakes seasoned with jam and whiskey which he had loved to cook for Sean and his mother when he came to their cottage for supper.

  ‘Wouldn’t His Reverence make someone a grand wife!’ The tart joke had signalled Sean’s mother’s resistance. The priest, as a friend of her late husband’s, had wanted Sean to go to boarding school.

  ‘He’s got the grey matter. We could get him a scholarship. Would you not think about it, Maire?’

  But the widow thought only of her loneliness. Few, she argued, who left came back! Look what had happened her poor husband, Bat.

  What had happened was that Bat, being desperate for cash to stock their small, rundown farm, went to work for a North-London builder, fell off a roof and died. Hopes of compensation died too when witnesses blamed the fall on Bat’s having drunk too many pints on his lunch-break in a pub called The Good Mixer.

  ‘Poor Bat! Why wouldn’t he drink and he far from home?’

  Once tears started, talk of boarding school had to be set aside and the widow comforted with more pancakes and hot whiskey.

  ‘Crêpes,’ the priest called the light concoctions which he tossed with a flourish of his frying pan – he always brought his own – turning them out as thin as doylies and as lacey with air-bubbles as fizzy lemonade. ‘Gluttony’, he’d say, patting his troublesome paunch, ‘is a safe sin and unlikely to lead to worse.’ He kept the paunch more or less in order by rowing round the lake or hiking over mountain bogs to shoot snipe.

  Another hobby was writing children’s books which, to his amazement, made money. He was a lively man whose popularity was heightened by rumours that he had been exiled to this parish after falling foul of Rome. Cronin was a local name, so he was liked for that too; but what gave him glamour was the whisper that he had been groomed to be a high-flier, then grounded. Connoisseurs of sad balladry, the locals commiserated. The false dawn of the 1960s had misled Father Tim who, having joined the Church in its moment of exuberant reform, felt he’d been sold a pup when ex-classmates were punitively dispersed and their mentor, a liberal theologian, kicked upstairs to Rome where the Polish ecclesiastical mafia could keep tabs on him. Cronin himself ended up in what some wag dubbed ‘this Irish Siberia’.

  ‘Remember what they say about ill winds? They’ve blown our own man back to us! We should be grateful!’

  ‘We should be thanking our stars!’

  Sean couldn’t remember who’d said that. It could have been almost anyone softened by pity and the pleasure of hearing Father Tim sing. For he had that talent too. Both in the gloom of the hotel bar – brown but glinty with glass cases displaying stuffed fish – and out on the lake he would always oblige with a song. And he sang well. Though no one wondered at first whether he felt drawn to riskier pleasures, the question, later, grew hard to dodge.

  *

  ‘The Church’, Mr Lynch assured Sean, ‘has no claim on the money coming to you. It’s from his children’s books. Did your father read them to you? When my kids were small they loved me to read them aloud.’

  Sean, who had thought the books silly, didn’t say so. They were about some animal, and his father’s copies had been lent or given away. Sean had been ten when his father fell from the roof, and what he remembered was the priest saying he’d try to take his place, ‘until we’re all together again’. Cronin had put his arms around Sean and soothed and rocked him until it felt as if his father really were in some way present. After that the priest sang a great, deep, glum but somehow comforting hymn which made Sean cry. Father Cronin had had a thrilling bass voice. Calling him ‘father’ was embarrassing though, so Sean wouldn’t.

  ‘Nor “Daddy”! I can’t call you that!’ Half laughing, he’d licked smeared tears from his fingers.

  ‘Call me Tim so.’

  ‘I’m too young. People here wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Because you’re a priest.’

  Father Cronin blew out an angry breath. ‘Do they think I should be on the job full time? Wearing the aul’ collar?’

  ‘Collar?’

  ‘The Roman one. It’s like being on a leash. Like having a sign that says “the wearer of this may at no time be teased, shown affection or otherwise distracted from his function”.’

  Sean must have looked puzzled, for Cronin squeezed his shoulder and began to sing a song about a cowboy who was ‘wrapped in white linen and going to die’. It had an Irish tune and he said that what it was really about was syphilis.

  ‘Don’t be shocked,’ he told Sean. ‘Stories about the pain in everyday lives hold more for us than ones about shootouts and bent sheriffs.’

  But Cronin wouldn’t have mentioned syphilis to a ten-year-old, so that must have been said years later – maybe when the priest was being obliged to leave the valley and was once again singing his sad songs. Both times he advised Sean to forget the story about his father’s drinking in The Good Mixer and any notions he might be harbouring of going to London to sort out the treacherous witnesses. ‘That’s cowboy stuff,’ he warned. ‘Dangerous! Indeed most dreams of justice and improvement do more harm than good.’

  ‘Was he unhappy?’ Sean asked Lynch, who said Tim might have been better off in some foreign slum or shanty town where he’d have felt needed.

  ‘His parish here was getting depopulated, so what was there for him to do? Fish? Chat with me on the ’phone? Take a trip to Cork or Dublin? Mostly, there he’d be, stuck in that grim presbytery with sly young curates whom he daren’t trust. Having to mind what he said. A brilliant man who’d loved company and adored children. The stories he wrote for them tell a lot! You’ll remember, maybe, that they were about a seal which played so restlessly in the water that a great foam ruff formed around its neck, and people cried, “That seal should be in a circus!” But this was the creature’s downfall for it grew ambitious. Of course,’ Lynch shook his head, ‘it was a secret parable. The seal was Cronin himself: black with a white collar, too clever for his own good, stuck in the wrong element and yearning to be on a bigger stage. That private joke gave the stories edge.’

  ‘It passed me by,’ Sean admitted.

  ‘It did?’ Lynch looked disappointed. ‘That’s because you hadn’t known him when he was young. I suppose you won’t remember the talk of priests marrying either? Tim firmly believed for years that that reform was in the pipeline. Wishful thinking, to be sure! He’d wanted kids of his own, you see. He envied me my three and desperately needed something more than he had in his life. He’d gone to Rome very young as secretary to one of the more go-ahead theologians working on the Council and found it hard, later, to simmer down. I used to tell him that the fiery haloes the old painters drew around saints’ heads showed that their brains were boiling like his, and that their purgatory was going on inside them. He’d laugh and say I should have been a theologian. When I read his stories, I told him that his seal’s foam ruff was a fallen halo. Ash!’

  ‘Rome was the circus?’

  ‘Oh the Circus Maximus! What else?’ Lynch’s tone was lightly scornful. ‘I suppose you read the stories about him too? Later. In the press? Flimsy speculation amplified by gossip! To my mind they’d not have stood up in court. Remember what was said?’

  Sean nodded. How forget? It was a year now since Sergeant Breen had delivered his tip-off. The day had been clear and cool. A breeze, ruffling the lake, made it shiver like foil, and the d
azzle in Sean’s eye lingered long after he’d stepped, squinting, into the shade.

  Broom in hand and clad in a cast-off cassock, he was busy cleaning the lake-side chapel for the May devotions when a shadow alerted him. The policeman stood in the arched doorway, blocking the light. The arch was narrow, and Breen was a burly man. The chapel, a Victorian-Gothic folly, stayed locked all winter, and Sean kept the key.

  ‘Mister Dunne!’

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Sean’s mock-formality matched the sergeant’s. He had been to school with Breen’s sons, Seamus and J.J., so being addressed as ‘Mister’ was either a joke or it meant something was up.

  ‘Let’s talk in my car.’ As Breen’s silhouette backed towards the light, the nap on his uniform glowed like filament.

  Sean followed him out, then, once in the garda car, wished he had stopped to remove the niffy, soiled cassock. It was only good now for use as an overall when clearing out the mould and mouse-droppings which collected in the chapel every winter. One year he had found bats.

  ‘You’ve been a sort of volunteer sexton, have you?’ Breen put the car into gear. ‘Since Father Cronin’s day?’

  There was something about his tone.

  ‘You know I have.’ Sean tried to get the cassock off, but lacked space for manœuvre, and the cloth tore. Rotten! At one time he had enjoyed wearing the old garment. It had carried prestige, set off his waist, and swung pleasingly when he strode. A label with a coat of arms was sewn into one seam. The young Father Cronin had had it made by a Roman tailor, and in its day it had had style. Now, well … Sean started to undo the buttons.

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Breen. ‘Between myself and yourself, Father Mac doesn’t like you wearing that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I thought you should know.’

  ‘Did he ask you to tell me?’ That would be like the new PP. Father MacDermot, Cronin’s successor, was leery of local resentments and fond of delegating.

  ‘In a way.’ Breen drew up in a rough slot hacked out between tall rhododendrons. Once prized, these were now growing too vigorously, and foresters had turned against them. Blossoms, filtering the sunlight, threw purple patches on the grass. ‘Have a read.’ Breen handed Sean a folder of newspaper clippings. ‘It’s background. Father Mac wants you briefed before we meet the men from Dublin. They’re trying to mount a case against Cronin.’

  ‘Against Father Tim? What kind of a case? Who?’

  The sergeant nodded at the folder. ‘That’ll help understand.’

  Sean ran his eye over headlines which someone had haloed with a yellow marker. ‘Roman Catholic monks’, he read, ‘to attend sex-offenders’ programme. Church in disarray. Former headmaster denies assaulting boys in dormitories. Priests to resume duties after police find no basis for allegations of abuse. Teacher at St Fiachra’s suspended pending …’ St Fiachra’s was the school where Father Cronin had been teaching.

  Sean handed back the file. ‘What’s this about?’ he asked. ‘I’m a gom and an innocent. Make it clear to me.’

  ‘Buggery,’ said Breen simply. ‘Child-abuse.’ A charge, he explained, had been made by a past pupil of Father Cronin’s, and was being investigated. There was no corroborative evidence, so detectives planned to look into the priest’s record in this parish. ‘Two are coming down this afternoon. We got a message to say they’ll want statements from men who were close to Cronin when they were boys. Such as …’ Breen’s voice wobbled, ‘yourself. Mind you,’ steadying, the voice soothed, ‘it may all fizzle out.’

  *

  ‘You can’t prove a negative.’ Mr Lynch gave Sean a shrewd look. ‘So if rumours bother you, you’d best up sticks and move. Go to Dublin. City people have no time to waste on the past. Here …’

  ‘My mother …’

  ‘Ah, I forgot. Bedridden, isn’t she? With arthritis? So you can’t leave.’

  ‘No.’

  *

  There was probably nothing to it, concluded Breen. Cases of this sort were often either fanciful or touched off by mental trouble. But even those stirred up a stink, and no way did Father Mac or the superintendent of the local gardai want fall-out reaching this parish. ‘I suppose that cassock was Cronin’s? Best give it to me.’ Getting out of the car, Breen took a plastic bin-liner from the boot, folded the cassock into it and stowed the package away. Returning to his seat, he said he hoped he’d made it clear that Father Mac and the super wanted us all to mind what we said to outsiders. That included Dublin detectives.

  ‘Discretion is in everyone’s interests. Tell them as little as you can.’ The big danger, Breen warned, was the press. Sensational newspaper stories could force the hands of the gardai and maybe lead to cases for damages. Later. Down the road! ‘Then who do you think would be left with the bill? Not Dublin! Us.’ Breen’s tone was weary. His message whorled like the design on a finger print.

  *

  ‘You weren’t serious,’ Lynch hoped, ‘just now about maybe saying “no” to the legacy.’

  Sean blushed. ‘No.’

  ‘That’s all right so. Because if you did, people would see it as a guilty verdict. That, coming from you, would be damaging.’

  *

  ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ Sean told Sergeant Breen. ‘Father Cronin was always an innocent.’

  ‘Good man. Stick to that.’

  ‘It’s true. He’s …’ Sean, who had been about to say ‘a lovely man’, didn’t, because just now the words did not sound innocent at all. Neither did ‘idealist’, which, he knew from Cronin himself, could be code for ‘disloyal’. ‘What are people saying?’ he thought to ask.

  ‘What aren’t they saying?’ Tipping his cap back on his poll, the sergeant threw up his eyes. ‘Mostly,’ he told the car ceiling, ‘they’re telling jokes about priests!’ Taking a last, red drag from his cigarette, he dropped it through the window, then opened the car door to stamp out the butt. As if ungagged, he began to talk angrily about priest-baiting. ‘It’s the new sport! People are taking revenge for the way they used to lick clerical boots. That’s how it goes! The wind changes and flocks attack their pastors. Killer sheep! Anti-clerical mice! They’ll turn on poor Cronin because they used to bow and scrape to him! They’ll have it in for you too because they used to envy your friendship with him. Nowadays if they saw you in a cassock, they’d say you were in drag. Cassocks are out! Coats have been turned. Don’t look at me like that. I’m too old to turn mine, which is why I’m giving you the benefit of what I know. Steer clear of the lickspittle who gets a chance to spit! My granda told me it was the same when the English left.’

  Breen raised his big, soft policeman’s palm. Wait, it signalled. ‘I know we all wore clerical gear when we were kids serving mass. I did and so did Seamus and JJ. But you kept it up.’

  ‘Jesus, Sergeant Breen!’

  ‘Sean, I’m trying to help. I know you don’t go much to pubs because of your father and all. So you mayn’t know what people are like now.’ The sergeant shook his head. ‘They’re rabid. Did you hear about the two altar boys in a parish I won’t name who tried to blackmail the priest? Threatened to accuse him of abuse if he didn’t pay them a hundred pounds apiece, so he denounced them from the pulpit. Guess what happened.’

  ‘The parish wanted to lynch them?’

  ‘Wrong! It wanted to lynch him.’ Breen’s fist thumped his palm. ‘What one parishioner told the gardai was that most priests – note the “most”! – only became priests so as to mess with boys. Girls were a risk, but boys were as safe as goats, and access went with the job. “There they used to be”, says this fellow, “rows of them with bare thighs and short pants. Choir boys, altar boys and the confirmation class. A sight more convenient than a trip to Thailand.”’

  Breen’s snort of laughter could have been pure shock. The rhododendrons threw a purple splotch onto his already vivid face.

  Sean had trouble taking all this in. ‘What harm did Father Cronin do anyone?’

  ‘Probably none.�
�� Breen’s mood had changed. Adjusting the peak of his cap, he started the engine. ‘We’ll do our best for him anyway. No need to tell the Dubliners that you and I talked. They asked who here had been close to him, so your name came up. You were close, weren’t you? What’s this that Vincentian used to call you? The one who came every May for the fishing? When you and our J.J. were teenagers. Cronin’s “fidus Achates”, was it? What did that mean?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Sean remembered the Vincentian. Cheerful Father Jones, a demon at the dart board. He’d been one of a succession of holiday priests whose mass Sean had served in the island chapel. ‘Fidus?’ Sean guessed must be like the dog’s name ‘Fido’. Faithful?

  *

  ‘Remember the talk of false memory syndrome?’ Lynch asked.

  ‘Of course. It showed the charges were lies.’

  ‘Not quite. It stopped them going to court. But stories are like viruses. They mutate.’

  *

  Driving past the lake’s sparkle where sharp waves tongued the shore, they reached the small cemetery whose roughly cut tombstones reflected the sparkle. ‘What’s that tag about not speaking ill of the dead,’ asked Breen. ‘De mort … what? You used to be a great one for the Latin tags.’

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘It’s a dumb message,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s the living we shouldn’t speak ill of. What harm can slanders do the dead?’

  Sean, only half listening, burned to think how he’d gloried in being called Cronin’s ‘fidus Achates’. He hadn’t studied Latin, and the visiting priests must have thought him a parrot. No, it seemed likely now that they’d thought something worse! And Cronin let them. Hot with humiliation, Sean thought ‘bastard’, then told himself that no, the priest had been moved by – what? High spirits? Carelessness? Loneliness? Affection? Poor bastard! Poor Father Tim.