The Breath of Night

by Michael Arditti

  ‘Nick – Old Nick. From our Dutch word, nikken.’

  ‘Would that be after your estrangement?’

  ‘Our what?’

  ‘I’m sorry, maybe I’ve misunderstood, but in one of his prison letters he wrote that your friendship had run its course.’

  ‘Run its course?’ Hendrik ruminated. ‘How very Julian! I’m not sure how long its course was to begin with. Ours was a friendship more of circumstance than choice. If you want someone close to him, the “beloved disciple” as it were, you need Father Benito Bertubin.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but he appears to have vanished off the face of the earth.’

  Hendrik looked at him in bemusement. ‘The refuse dumps of Manila may be hell on earth, but they’re still on it.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Father, no, plain Benito – I may be mistaken but I think he left the priesthood – is working just a few miles from here with the people who live on refuse: that is on it and off it.’

  ‘Even if he’s no longer a priest, surely the Church authorities would know that? The Vicar General of Baguio told me categorically that they had no idea where he was.’

  ‘They may not.’

  ‘Do you think that’s likely?’ Hendrik shrugged. ‘Then why should he lie to me? Benito knew Julian better than anyone. They were locked up together for a year. Are they afraid that his politics will be a black mark against Julian with a conservative Curia?’

  ‘Maybe Benito himself will give you the answer?’

  ‘Do you have his address?’ Philip struggled to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  ‘No, but you don’t need it. Just ask any taxi driver to take you to the Payatas refuse dump.’

  ‘Is it that big?’

  ‘Estimates vary, but some say 60,000 people live on it.’

  ‘You mean off it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m finding it hard to get my head around this. A high-ranking priest deliberately misled me. I suppose, given all the clerical cover-ups of recent years, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sorry; I don’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘And I mustn’t abuse your hospitality, that is your time. I’ll go to Payatas of course, but meanwhile, if there’s anything you can think of to tell me, anything at all… Julian wrote that he met you in Brabant, which seems a strange place for an Englishman to study.’

  ‘There’s always been a strong Dutch flavour to the Society. Our founder, Henry Vaughan, sent one of his closest associates to establish the seminary at Roosendaal in 1890, which was where I met Julian some seventy years later. We liked and, I trust, respected each other. But that was as far as it went. Intimacy was frowned upon. We were cloistered young men. Well, I don’t need to spell it out for you with your English public schools.’

  ‘Most of them now admit girls.’

  ‘Progress or merely change? Not that the Church is particularly keen on either. Discipline at the seminary was very strict. We were required to gather in groups of three or more. “Numquam duo, semper tres.” The Master of Novices even chose our companions for walks. In any case, Julian was something of a loner. Though maybe that was forced upon him. People were wary of him because he’d been to Oxford.’

  ‘But I thought he read theology.’

  ‘Quite. Oxford was regarded as a hotbed of heresy. Everyone – staff and students alike – were afraid that his spiritual values had been put at risk by his course.’

  ‘Nonetheless, you must have formed a special bond since he invited you to Whitlock.’

  ‘I can’t have been the only one.’

  ‘You’re the only one he mentions. But then you’re the only one he met again out here.’

  ‘I was so nervous. It was my first time – and my only time – to visit one of your old English houses. Julian told me not to worry if I broke the rules. His parents would make allowances for me as a foreigner. You may imagine how much that put me at my ease!’

  ‘Did you meet the whole family?’

  ‘Just his parents and his sisters. His brother was working – in London, I think.’

  ‘And what was your overall impression?’

  ‘That they were the oddest people I’d ever met. Not his mother – she was a very gracious lady – but as for the rest of them, I think that the polite word – the English word – is eccentric. At our first meal, the maid brought round a tray of chops. We ate a lot of chops. Julian’s older sister – I forget her name…’

  ‘Agnes.’

  ‘Agnes, that’s right.’ Hendrik smiled. ‘She refused it and I asked if she was a vegetarian. She looked as horrified as if I’d asked if she was a virgin. “Certainly not,” she replied, “but I only eat meat that I’ve killed myself.” And the maid brought her a slice of game pie.’

  ‘I thought it was his younger sister, Cora, who was the eccentric one.’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly! She was obsessed with a television newsreader. She used to copy down passages from his bulletins and decipher his secret messages to her. Later that summer Julian was called home because she had fallen pregnant. She swore that the newsreader was the father and stirred up a lot of trouble, writing letters to him, to the papers and to the BBC. To make matters worse, she swelled up – Julian said it looked as if she was carrying twins – and her father blamed one of the men working on the estate. Then the newsreader was taken off the air – I’m quite sure there was no connection – and, overnight, Cora’s stomach shrank. It was as though she had had the baby, except that there was no baby. For the rest of his life Julian felt guilty that he had not done enough to help her, that he had spent so much time away from home. On the other hand he was convinced that if he’d stayed, he would have ended up like her.’

  ‘Mad?’

  ‘Disturbed,’ Hendrik replied with a frown. ‘To my mind, most of the problems stemmed from their father. He had the coldest smile I’ve ever seen. I kept out of his way as much as I could. Though there was no escape when he invited me fishing. To everyone’s surprise, I caught a large salmon. “You’re not feeding the five thousand, you know,” he said icily, before remembering to shake my hand.’

  ‘A curious remark to address to a trainee priest!’

  ‘He had no love for the Church, much to Julian’s regret. I’m sure you know the story of his vocation?’

  ‘Only the barest outline. If you can fill in any details…’

  ‘Not many, I’m afraid. His father had been captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He spent years in a prison camp, long after the fighting in Europe had ended and other boys’ fathers had come home. All the children prayed every night for his safe return, but Julian went one further and vowed that if his father survived, he’d become a priest. The irony – no, the tragedy – was that, by pledging himself to God, he’d done the thing most calculated to alienate his father, who had lost his faith in the war – at least Julian claimed it was in the war, although I suspect that he was trying to justify it.’

  ‘Do you think he’d still have become a priest if his father hadn’t returned from Burma?’

  ‘Most definitely, but then I believe that a priest is called by God.’

  ‘That must be a comfort.’

  ‘It was once.’

  Hendrik’s face clouded and Philip preferred not to probe.

  ‘It must have been a shock – it was for Julian – when you met up again in Manila.’

  ‘Absolutely. He was the last person I was expecting. I thought he was still in Liverpool.’

  ‘Yes, what was that about? It seems an unlikely place to send a missionary.’

  ‘Especially Julian! He was our star student and we assumed that he’d be given one of the more challenging postings. I remember when I first heard about it. The Rector of the House was hosting his traditional post-ordination party for family and friends. Halfway through, he announced that the Superior General was ready to see us in his study. One by one we went in, then came back and shouted out w
here we were going, to be greeted by a burst of applause. I was off to Pakistan – a remote part of Sindh province. Then Julian came back and called out “Liverpool!”. There was a deathly silence, until at last someone started to clap and everyone else followed suit. The Rector explained that because of his exceptional qualities, Julian had been chosen to stay at home and nurture the next generation of missionaries, and Julian insisted that he was happy to fulfil whatever task God had assigned to him, but there was no denying that it was a blow.’

  The cat limped back into the room.

  ‘So how long did you spend in Pakistan?’

  ‘Four years: the four happiest years of my life. I lived there among the Kutchi Kohli, a Hindu tribe who worked as sharecroppers for feudal landlords.’

  ‘Much like the tenant farmers in San Isidro.’

  ‘Except that they were already Christians, whereas I had the inestimable blessing of saving souls for the Lord.’

  ‘Yet you moved here?’

  ‘Not from choice, believe me! I was deeply reluctant to come to a place where the Church was so well established.’

  ‘It does seem strange to send missionaries to such a fanatically Catholic country.’

  ‘The Philippines have always been an anomaly in the Society’s operation, but after the expulsion of the friars the Pope called on Western missionaries to come to the aid of the Church here and we’ve stayed on ever since. Like Julian, I soon found my niche. Despite working in such different worlds, we felt the same need to join the struggle for justice.’

  ‘Maybe in years to come (not too soon, I trust!), another bishop not a million miles from here will be putting together another Positio?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ Hendrik said, pointing to the sampler. ‘You’ve read the writing on the wall.’ Philip glanced at it again, as the cat leapt on to his lap. Startled, he attempted to stroke her head while balancing his notepad on her knobbly back. ‘I invited Julian to stay with me in Angeles. He had boasted – no, that’s not fair, enthused – about all the progress he was making in the parish: the Bible study groups and agricultural projects and health education classes he’d set up. His life was as straightforward as mine had been in Pakistan. I wanted him to appreciate what it was like for those of us who were fighting a more insidious enemy, not economic oppression but human desire.’

  ‘Surely the danger occurs when the two come together? Sex-starved soldiers with dollars to spare. Julian was appalled by what he saw in Angeles and in a letter home (no doubt censored) he laid the blame squarely on the shoulders – and the pockets – of the US military.’

  ‘He was right. The Filipinos tell a joke to make light of their long history of Spanish and American occupation: “We spent three hundred years in a convent and fifty in Hollywood.” But they’ve picked the wrong myth. It wasn’t Hollywood so much as the Wild West. And the sheriffs were just as corrupt as the gunmen. They polluted the whole environment. There were even monkeys around the airbase who became addicted to American Wonder Bread.’

  ‘Is that a metaphor?’

  ‘No, it’s a fact. They soon learnt that a few simple tricks would earn them their daily crusts. The girls – or LBFMs as they were known – weren’t so lucky.’

  ‘LBFMs?’

  ‘Little Brown Fucking Machines.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘They had to perform more and more sophisticated tricks, as the men’s appetites grew more and more jaded. After all, when you’ve had a different eighteen-year-old every night for a week, you’re happy to pay a dollar or two extra for a sixteen-year-old and then a fourteen-year-old and then a twelve-year-old. Need I go on?’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘But they did go on. On and on right down to children of five or six. Baby Brown Fucking Machines.’

  ‘Julian was full of praise for your efforts to rescue them, despite all the threats from the pimps and bar owners.’

  ‘And the Mayor who claimed that I was jeopardising commerce and the military chiefs who claimed that I was jeopardising morale. And the mothers – don’t forget the mothers, since they were usually the ones who sold the girls.’

  ‘But not at five or six?’

  ‘How does a prostitute live when she’s too old or sick to attract custom? Either she earns a few pesos doing laundry for her younger colleagues, or else she prostitutes her own children. Some combine the two, sprinkling soap powder in the girls’ drinking water to keep them from infection.’

  ‘It’s unbearable, even at a distance, yet you worked there for – how long?’

  ‘Thirty-four years.’

  ‘How did you ward off despair?’

  ‘I’m a priest, Mr Seward,’ Hendrik said.

  ‘Of course,’ Philip replied, uncertain if he had been given an answer or a rebuke.

  ‘At the end of the day – at the end of a life – the most any of us can hope for is that our actions result in more good than bad.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather pessimistic for a priest?’

  ‘I’d prefer to think of it as realistic. I’m not a monk praying in a cloister; I’m out in the world. And this – this you can write in your pad –’ Philip realised with a jolt that he had been so engrossed in the conversation that he had stopped taking notes. ‘I’m convinced that even in his far-flung parish Julian felt the same.’

  ‘I’ve always understood that to a Christian, motives mattered as much as – if not more than – results.’

  ‘Which is why I need to redress the balance,’ Hendrik said, staring at him hollow-eyed.

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘And I hope that you never will. I have fought many enemies over the years, but the most powerful, the most persistent has been myself.’ Philip’s stomach clenched as Hendrik’s words presaged a confession. ‘In a world where priests are held to be guilty of every sin that they condemn, let me make one thing absolutely clear: I never laid a finger on any of those girls, never touched them with more than a handkerchief to dry their tears or a flannel to wipe off the dirt. But I had thoughts. And in thirty-four years the thoughts built up until they became the secret story of my life.’

  ‘Was there no one you could talk to?’

  ‘Yes, Julian. I went to visit him in San Isidro and I talked to him more candidly than I have talked to anyone before or since. I told him of the toll that the work was having on me, body and soul: how I saw the wraithlike children, not yet come into the fullness of their sin, and I was overwhelmed with love for them. But it was not the love that Our Lord instructed us to feel for “these little ones”; it was longing. I told him that I saw the bruised and broken girls in the refuge and, even as I bathed their wounds, I was stifling the urge to inflict more. I was sure that it was only my horror at the effects of other men’s lusts that saved me from succumbing to my own. I told him that I had resolved to write to the Regional and ask to be sent somewhere there were fewer temptations – somewhere like San Isidro,’ he said sourly.

  ‘But the Regional didn’t listen?’

  ‘I didn’t write. Julian talked me out of it. Not having known him, you can have no idea of his powers of persuasion. He charged me to remember that God had sent me here for a purpose. He was testing me, and I had no right to run away. He – Julian, not God’ – Hendrik laughed – ‘told me that I must turn my weakness into strength, my vice into virtue, and that, having recognised the offence in myself, I would be better able to fight it in others and that, by fighting it in others, I would defeat it in myself.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No, it grew ever more consuming: awake, asleep and, most painfully of all, at prayer, until I stared at my crucifix and saw not salvation but sin.’

  ‘Did you speak of it again to Julian?’

  ‘He spoke of it to me; he wrote to me; he even sent me a cheque for the refuge, a mark of faith that felt more like a mockery. He returned to Angeles some years later in search of a missing parishioner. And that was the last time I saw him. I reali
se that he was shocked, not just by the depravity of the bars but by my detachment. No matter that I needed to mix with the owners for the sake of the girls; I had failed his test, which I sometimes think was more exacting than God’s. There was certainly more of Moses in him than of Christ.’

  ‘So I take it that you don’t regard him as a saint?’

  ‘Did I say that? It depends how you define “saint”. For me, a saint has to be full of humanity and not just of God. He has to have blood as well as chrism in his veins. He has to understand the corruption that we lesser mortals find in ourselves and so enable us to rise above it. Whereas Julian had none of that. He was somebody who never touched pitch – who never even caught a whiff of its fumes – his entire life.’

  Eight

  3 March 1981

  My dear Mother and Father,

  Forgive me if this is shorter than usual, but what with catching up in the parish and the visit of the Holy Father I’ve been run ragged since my return. It struck me halfway through yesterday’s mass (that’s how bad it’s been) that I’d promised to let you know I was back. I apologise for the delay, although I trust that Father’s typically frank reminder that you’d hear soon enough if there were a problem reassured you, Mother.

  Apart from bringing me back in one piece, the flight had little to recommend it. I was sitting beside a well-groomed man in his thirties with the attention span of a gnat (although, given the tenacity of gnats in the convento, I’m maligning them). On hearing that I was a priest, he lectured me – at length – on the iniquities of organised religion. Thankfully, he fell asleep somewhere above the Alps, giving me the chance to reflect on the trip. It’s a truism to note how the month sped by. After the initial adjustments (sorry about the beard; I thought I’d warned you), we’d barely resumed our old rhythm when we were plunged into the excitement of the wedding. Then, a week later I was preparing to fly back. In spite – or, indeed, because – of all the letters we’d exchanged, there was so much ground for us to cover. Do you suppose that anybody has the luxury of picking up where they left off? Perhaps Cora? But then I suspect that she has a fairy-tale sense of time.