The Devil's Diary, page 15
‘Why?’ Hugo asked, his beard sticking up over the rim of the blanket.
‘She was with you in this room last night.’
‘You’re quick to jump to conclusions. We had a drink and a chat, then between us we finished the crossword. There was no hanky and no panky, no jiggery and no pokery. We didn’t commit fornication, if that’s what you want to know.’
‘This is a parochial house, not a night club. If you invite Olga in here again, you will have to find yourself bed and board elsewhere.’
‘You’re a hard man, Father. You’re hard on everyone except yourself.’
Hugo pulled the bedclothes up over his head and emitted a long, vibrant snore.
Chapter 14
In the afternoon he felt strong enough to get up. Neither he nor Hugo mentioned Olga, and she did not come to the parochial house again. Though he did his best to avoid her, he could not keep from thinking about her. She had blurred the clarity of his image of her. Like her wood carving of the weeping woman, she had become shadowed and ambiguous, full of dark and unacknowledgeable promptings. Perhaps it was not her fault. What he had seen in her was not an errant human being but a refined reflection, a woman who had sprung fully armed from his head.
He would turn his back and not look over his shoulder. Some things in life were best forgotten. The world of memory and desire was seductive and transforming, and simply had to be transcended. Hugo was immersed in that world, a warm equatorial lake of floating weeds and algae. Better to live in the icy blue waters of the Arctic that enliven every body cell with an awareness of discomfort and animate the mind itself with a knowledge of mind-in-body.
One evening a week later, as he was laying out milk and biscuits for two, a sharp double-knock at the door made him think of her. He paused in the hallway, waiting for another knock. The middle-aged man who looked up at him took him by surprise. He was short, bald and stocky, and a shade too neatly dressed for the country.
‘I’m John Delgany,’ he said. ‘I was passing and I thought I’d introduce myself.’
Father Jerry invited him into the study and offered him a seat but not a glass of milk. His suspicion that his visitor was none other than Brennan redux was soon confirmed.
‘I’ve just bought the late Mr Brennan’s business. I thought it would be a good idea if we talked.’
‘Did you buy it as a businessman or as a philanthropist performing a corporal work of mercy?’
‘As a businessman, of course. As a shrewd one, I hope. The receiver made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’m arranging a government grant and with a bit of luck we’ll get a loan from the EEC. All in all the future looks bright.’
‘As you may have heard, I was not among Brennan’s most ardent admirers. I’ve always thought, and still do, that he did irreparable harm here.’
‘I’ve been told about your differences. What I had hoped was that you and I might reason together and try to see things as they are. Unlike Mr Brennan, I’m a stranger here. I start with a clean slate and the hope that I can rely on the support of the community and especially of its leaders.’
Father Jerry launched into a ten-minute lecture to which Mr Delgany listened in cheerful silence.
‘Not all priests think as you do,’ he said as he rose to go. ‘I’ve already spoken to Canon Hackler, a most practical and far-sighted man. I think we see eye to eye.’
Canon Hackler ‘looked in’ the following evening. Ostensibly, he had come to enquire about his curate’s health, and indeed he devoted fifteen minutes to recounting his own experiences of wettings and sudden chills. Father Jerry poured him the obligatory bumper of Balvenie while trying to divine the true purpose of his visit. First the canon spoke about the bell and how it had aroused the interest of the bishop. While he realised that it was primarily Father Jerry’s concern, he could not help feeling that the bishop would hold the parish priest responsible for any lack of urgency in replacing it. At last he came to Mr Delgany’s visit and his own belief that priests must show leadership in all matters affecting the material welfare of the parish.
‘We must keep our young men at home where we can keep an eye on them. In this case spiritual salvation depends on material good. As a man who began his ministry in a sinful city, you’re bound to agree.’
‘I’ve seen more ungodliness on the Glebe than I ever saw in London.’
Canon Hackler did not reply; his mind was on higher things. Mr Delgany’s talent for business had obviously reminded him of the need for sound financial management in the Church. He discoursed at length and with elephantine flatulence on the merits of bingo as opposed to charity dances in fund raising, and he recommended that Father Jerry start a weekly bingo evening in the motel. He had raised the possibility with Mr Delgany whose attitude could not have been more helpful. Father Jerry was sympathetically non-committal. He praised Mr Delgany for his sartorial elegance and he agreed that bingo, though less enlivening, was a more innocent pastime than dancing which was the kind of thing they did in sinful cities.
Canon Hackler put down his glass with a force that betrayed extreme irritation, and picked up his hat by the brim. In the hallway he turned and gave his curate a long look of steadfast scrutiny.
‘You look tired. Perhaps you need a rest.’
‘I’m feeling much better now, thank you.’
‘If you ever wish for a change of parish, do tell me. A word in the bishop’s ear never goes unheard.’
‘It’s very kind of you. I’ve already told the bishop that I’m happy here, serving my people as I think they should be served.’
‘Serving is more than praying, which in a sense is only self-exploration. We live in the world and we must give the world its due. We must look outwards with a readiness to make compacts and compromises, to beat the Devil at his own game.’
Alone in his study again, Father Jerry dropped into his softest armchair. He did not reject the world for reasons of theology or philosophy, he simply did not believe in it. The only reality that had any meaning for him was the reality within. Even his interest in Hugo’s diary arose from his conviction that he could make it into a vehicle for self-realisation. Canon Hackler would not, and could not, understand. Like most churchmen he saw the world as a straying cow that must be caught and milked. And if the cow turned out to be a bull, he would not be deterred in his milking. His fellow-clergy deemed him a success and eagerly sought his advice at chapter. Father Jerry thought different. The more he saw of other priests, the more he inclined to think with Nietzsche that ‘There has been only one Christian and He died on the cross.’
On Friday morning Hugo came down the stairs in a black jacket and trousers. Bearded and somewhat obese, he looked like a dishevelled patriarch of Constantinople.
‘I’m taking Olga to Dublin for the weekend,’ he said.
‘Again and so soon?’
‘I must see about my missing diaries. Without them I’m a gelding.’
‘You’re soberly dressed.’
‘I was hoping you’d like the cut of my jib. The jacket is Brennan’s and so are the trousers. I dyed them at Burke’s thinking that you might appreciate the symbolism. Understandably, the trousers are a bit tight at the crotch. Only an innocent would expect wonders from the lost-property office.’
‘It’s a jape you may live to regret.’
‘The colour scheme is not ideal for separates. Sadly, we must make do. Life is an accident. There is so little that is planned and pondered. Now, if Brennan could have foreseen the use to which his ensemble would be put, he would have chosen a fabric of a different colour. A suit of white cotton would have dyed beautifully. Nothing is perfect. God who ordains, bless His soul, has such an extraordinary sense of imperfection.’
Father Jerry watched him drive down the avenue. His brother saw life as a game of moral choices. The choices, of course, were for other people, never for himself. He was a puppeteer who pulled strings, whose greatest delight lay in prediction and anticipation. Recently, he’d been taciturn and preoccupied. He spent whole evenings with Olga and recorded nothing in his diary except detailed and rather tedious accounts of the work of renovation at Burke’s. Father Jerry was surprised, therefore, to find an entry about Olga that had been written the previous night:
September 15th
I write in haste, my thoughts leapfrogging my hand. To Dublin with Helga in the morning. Another opportunity; another train I must not miss. I’ve seen a lot of her in the last few weeks, and in a sense I’ve seen nothing. What does she want? Or should I say, ‘What doesn’t she want?’ It’s all beyond me. Is it Father Johnnie who’s on her mind? I know that she’s on his. McDowd is out of the running; now it’s a battle between siblings. It’s a battle he can’t win without losing more than he can give up unscathed. He’s a holy man with unholy preoccupations. My aim must be to sharpen his self-awareness; to get him to question his calcified morality, to give a sermon that relates to something other than itself. The only morality that keeps you alive and alert is one you have to make up as you go along. There I am his manifest superior. In my library (I mean my rucksack) are no sacred texts. No Bible. No Summa. Nothing given. Nothing received. My life is a Thermopylae. New swordsmen come out to meet me in the pass every morning, and I am the last Spartan standing. I suppose I should be grateful.
Helga doesn’t know me. She’s too troubled in herself to get to know me. She seems to like me now. For all I know she may love me but deep within her is something dark that holds her back. Yesterday I took her to see the Termon Stone and recounted the story of the Game. I made her read the inscription: ‘Arty Bradley 1941–86. Many’s the good Rub he had here’. It was early morning. We stood with our backs to the east looking down at our shadows on the oblong rock, twelve feet by six and two feet high, flat on top and covered with greyish lichen. I felt that we had shared a moment of mystery. I was about to tell her why we called it the Termon Stone when suddenly she turned and walked away.
‘How is Father Johnnie?’ she asked when I caught up with her.
‘Fighting demons like Columcille before him.’ ‘Is he still angry?’
‘Of course not. Anger is for lesser mortals like you and me. As a priest, he mustn’t let the sun go down on his.’
‘He was kind to me. I can’t help feeling that I’ve disappointed him.’
‘Then you must go into his confessional in the dark and tell him you haven’t sinned with me. Tell him that the only sins we’ve committed are those in his own inflamed imagination.’
Again she walked away and this time I did not follow. When she came back, I returned to the Termon Stone and the unchanging ritual of the Game. She listened only for a minute before interrupting.
‘Is Father Johnnie an artist or a scientist?’ she asked.
‘He’s an artist to judge by the length of his fingers. They’re so long and thin that they could have been painted by El Greco.’
‘To me he’s a scientist, perhaps a pathologist.’
‘You mean he deals in diseased souls?’
‘I once watched him eating a sea trout. He held the knife and fork so that they were almost vertical and he made an incision along the lateral line before stripping the trout of its skin.’
‘Was he wearing a white smock or a black cassock at the time?’
‘It was an operation of the utmost delicacy. He picked the backbone clean and then folded the skin over it, as if he wished to pretend to himself that he had not eaten.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. As a boy he used to blow eggs. O he was a queer one, Fol dol the di do.’
I could see that my conversation was not having the desired effect. Perhaps a visit to Scariff Island would do the trick, I thought. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll choose a calm day with a warm sun. We’ll sit on the hogsback and grill two sea trout on a spit. I’ll hold my knife vertically and make an incision along the lateral line with chirurgical delicacy, and she’ll say to me, ‘Hugo, you’re a scientist. Now at last I can love you.’
There is so much I want to tell her but the time is not ripe. If I showed her the knobbly sea stack now, she’d think me crude. Yet some time I must tell her that when I was a boy I knew it as the Stake. Then one day an old fisherman told me its secret name and it became my pillar of cloud by day and my pillar of fire by night – in the Ivory Coast, New Guinea and the Amazonian jungle. How can she understand these things? How can I make myself clear?
She’s a haunted woman. In Dublin she never feels safe. Once we lost our way heading north for the N4. Another motorist who saw my plight rolled down his window at some traffic lights and asked me if I wanted help. When I told him where I was heading, he said, ‘Follow me’. We followed him for five minutes. Then we got caught at the next set of lights, though he got through. Further along he pulled in and waited. That did it. Helga panicked. I could hear her heart pounding as she made me take a quick left. I had no idea what had come over her, until she told me that our ‘guide’ was the spitting image of her husband Dom.’
He closed his eyes, aware of nothing but a man and a woman alone in a speeding vehicle. Again he examined the hurried hand, half-regretting that he’d returned the anonymous letter to Canon Hackler. Dr Sharma had once said to him, ‘Unbeknown to yourself you are seeking to discover your place in the sexual universe. Though celibate by choice and perhaps by inclination, you do have a place. You can’t ignore women and neither can they ignore you.’ Dr Sharma was herself unmarried. She was the only woman he’d ever met who seemed entirely free of sexual compulsion. A wise virgin? Better still, a vestal virgin who tended no hearth but her own.
He looked round the room. The large bed was unmade, and on a chair in the corner lay an untidy pile of vests and underpants. On the carpet by the bed was a heap of old newspapers and an odd sock. Nothing was in its place because nothing had a place – except the faded photograph of their dead mother that stood accusingly on the mantelpiece between an empty tobacco tin and a bottle of black ink. He gazed at the picture, trying to recall something of her physical presence. He was rewarded with a memory of rustling underwear and a vague warmth that smelt of cloves. The curtains of the open window moved. Fine dust floated in a slanting sunbeam that seemed to spring up from beneath the wardrobe.
He opened the door of the wardrobe, wondering if Hugo had really dyed Brennan’s clothes. In the bottom, between two pairs of brogues, stood a wood carving that caused him to blink in bafflement. He picked it up and half-reluctantly turned it over in his hands. It was a grotesque piece of work, about two feet high, crudely executed and utterly lacking in proportion: the skull of a sheep on an emaciated body with protuberant breasts and buttocks. The arms of the sheep-woman extended outwards, while the legs bent at the knees as if she were about to leap off the blocklike base. In the skull were two gaping eye-sockets and between her legs hung a ridged mound that looked like an open sporran. The ugliness that the figure communicated was at once inside and outside himself. Within a volume of less than a cubic foot it embodied all the loathsomeness of Brennan’s glen, which had now become a cold and leaden faecalith in his bowels.
He put the figurine back in the wardrobe and firmly closed the door. What he had seen was the work of an artist who was living through a nightmare with her grip on daylight and sanity insecure. He went to his own bedroom and uncovered the carving of the weeping woman, so fine and lovingly done, so full of the expression of human vulnerability in a cold and indifferent world. He placed it on the windowsill and caressed the head and hair down to her knees. Clearly Olga, in a mood of disenchantment and cynicism, had carved different artifacts for different men.
Below the window the sea had become an eternity of dark blue fading into the pellucid blue of the sky. The day was bright and windless, the outline of the hills sharp and clear. What he wished for was the spiritual austerity of Savonarola, the passion of Luther, and the intellectual clarity of Aquinas. He carried the carving of the weeping woman out to the garage and laid it on a plank on the concrete floor. Then he took an axe belonging to Hugo and split the kneeling figure down the centre along the natural crack in the wood. He made a fire in the study with sticks and paper and put one half of the mutilated carving in the centre of the flames. He sat in the armchair and watched it burn until all that remained was a fistful of floury ash. After a while he carried the other half upstairs to his room, wrapped it in a sheet, and put it back in the bottom of the wardrobe.
Just before lunch a messenger from the widow in the mountains came to tell him that her son had taken a turn for the worse. Pleased to be called out in a time of trouble, he drove up the glen as the afternoon began to mellow into evening. The car breasted the hills, the breeze grew fresher and more pungent. He was pushing forward into a stern landscape out of sight of the sea and the more populous townlands by the shore. The narrow roads had passing places, the starkly weathered houses stood alone at the end of lanes. He had left Brennan’s base legacy behind in the west. The symbols of the old culture, which Brennan had enshrined in his folk museum, formed part of life’s living fabric here. He felt close to nature and the nature poetry of the early Irish monks and anchorites. After visiting the boy he would drive further east into the mountains where he would be alone with a few sheep, with rocks and stones.
The widow met him at the gate, her face drawn and pale. She grasped his hand and thanked him for coming so promptly. He followed her into the narrow bedroom where the form of the boy was barely discernible under the covers of the sagging bed. Father Jerry touched his forehead and held his hand. The boy opened his eyes and made a brave attempt to smile.
‘How are we feeling today?’ he asked.
‘My legs and arms are weak, and my back feels weak when I try to turn on my side.’
‘We’ll say a prayer. We’ll all ask God to make you better.’
In the boy’s eyes was a faraway look, as if his mind was on a country only he could see. With pity rather than hope in his heart, Father Jerry knelt by the bedside. The widow knelt next to him with her face buried in the bedclothes.
