Three Cheers For The Paraclete (10 page)

These demands touched Maitland. In many ways his emotions relating to friendship were still those of a blood-brothering ten-year-old.

‘I’m very flattered,’ he said so heartily that it sounded almost like sarcasm, though Egan did not notice. ‘I only hope I can help.’

‘That’s very kind,’ Egan told him, setting off again.

Maitland followed, thinking that this was life, that it was human relationships that perfected man; that maudlin activity called
helping out a friend
.

In Egan’s spruce room, a dark-haired woman lay flushed and stupefied on the bed. Her shoes were off, and the skirt of her elegant blue suit lay crookedly on her hips. Her long legs were in burgundy-coloured stockings, one knee torn. She was whimpering softly, and looked, if anything, beautiful.

‘What’s the trouble with her, Maurice?’

‘I did ask you about no questions,’ said Egan curtly.

‘I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?’

‘Forgive me, James. I just didn’t want you to prejudge her.’

‘I’m not pre-judging her. What do you want me to do?’

‘She arrived in a taxi.’ Egan walked towards the bed and frowned down at the woman. ‘She’s a responsible type of woman, she really is. That’s why I asked you not to make any judgments. However, she arrived in a taxi, and that’s scandal enough. She found her own way up to this room and wasn’t intercepted.’

With a peculiar and inexpert tenderness, he extended one hand towards the woman’s tumid face. His arm did not reach her. Not far away the students were singing, too late to be of aid to Egan, a hymn about God protecting their house from the evils of the night; and the high notes of the song plagued the woman’s ears. She rolled her head.

‘I can hardly bear to think what would have happened if Nolan had met her on the stairs. I find the
idea of his treating her as some sort of she-devil a revolting one.’

‘He would simply have said, “My dear girl, don’t you know this house is reserved to the use of celibate males?”’

‘She’s such a good Catholic really. It’s the idea of people judging her that I find particularly hard to take.’

Maitland said, ‘I’ve seen her somewhere, Maurice. Where would it have been?’

It was this question which, against the laws of logic, preoccupied him, the woman’s face evoking something both strong and recent.

‘I think you must be wrong,’ said Egan. He began to work at tidying his desk, not as an evasion but because here was a start to many things that had now to be done. So he put his notes away in a crisp folder and recapped his ball-point as carefully as if it had been a Conway-Stewart, and returned two vagrant paper-clips to the small jar he kept sacred to them.

‘I know,’ Maitland said. ‘Costello pointed out someone like her at the Couraigne prize turn-out.’ His memory had worked so strenuously on the girl’s face that only now that it had produced an answer did he begin to see how clumsily he was behaving.

‘That was her,’ Egan admitted without difficulty. ‘I suppose he told you something of her past. By that I mean her experience with the court.’

‘He mentioned something. I’m sorry, Maurice. I’m saying all the things you asked me not to.’

‘Don’t worry.’ The
defensor
was now at his wardrobe, taking out his stock and collar. ‘I’m very grateful,’ he said, raising his chin and wrapping the collar round it. With Maitland at hand to receive orders, he was fast regaining competence. ‘I can’t very well expect you to come into my room and find Nora in that sad state and not ask questions.’

‘I’ve asked my last.’

‘Well, I’ll answer the one you want to ask.’ He swallowed and said in a lower voice, ‘She is – somehow, I don’t know how – the worse for liquor. She is not an habitual drinker.’

Maitland could tell that by her complexion, which was fine-grained and unspoiled. She must have been perhaps thirty-two or three.

While pulling on his small bum-freezing coat, Egan said, ‘We have to get her home safely. Please tell me to go to the other place if you wish to, James. Do you own any sports clothes?’

He closed his eyes and, wincing and blind, adjusted the fall of his stock beneath the shoulders of his coat.

‘I’ve got a corduroy coat I used to wear in my flat in Louvain in the winters,’ Maitland told him, by way of a suggestion. ‘I’ve got a pair of denim trousers too.’

‘Oh my goodness!’

‘I agree. I’ve got an old pair of suede shoes that aren’t so inelegant.’

Maitland felt boyish – being in on a secret went part of the way towards intoxicating him, and that his presence had helped to make Egan look efficient again filled him with gaiety.

‘Black trousers wouldn’t look so queer under a corduroy coat,’ Egan was considering. As an aid to reflection he closed his eyes again and pinched the bridge of his nose. In the chapel the precentor’s voice rose willow-thin and climbed the dark. For the silliest of reasons, mainly for his being party to Egan’s plans, the chant seemed as ineptly beautiful, in this absurd building, among the Couraigne-type paintings, as it had seemed when he was seventeen.

The woman on the bed raised one lean thigh and mumbled, ‘It is three weeks since my last confession.’

Egan’s eyes blinked open.

‘You see, I must take her home myself,’ he explained. ‘I’m responsible in so many ways. But more than a matter of responsibility, it would be a terrible injustice to send her home in a taxi, like a common drunk. You see?’

‘Since then,’ moaned the woman, ‘I have been guilty on several occasions of criticizing the clergy …’

‘She lives with a sister,’ Maurice explained. ‘What I’m going to ask is so appalling that I can’t ask it gently. You see, the sister knows me. If I drive her home, will you take her to the door?’

‘In corduroy and denims?’

Egan’s eyes dropped. ‘Perhaps not the denims.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better to arrive as we are and simply tell the sister what happened?’

The little priest turned half away, snorting.

‘Very well,’ Maitland assured him. ‘Whatever you like.’

‘You’d better wear those suedes too, James. I’m sorry for being impatient, but this is a dreadful come-uppance. To speak brutally, a man dressed as a priest or known to be one can’t deliver an unconscious woman at her front door. I wonder could you wear a hat? And I’ve got an old pair of reading-glasses you might like to put on.’

‘Anything you say, Maurice. But I begin to sound like a white-slaver.’

‘You’ve every right to tell me to jump at myself. Tell me, can you drive, James?’

Egan’s small car lay in the cold bay of night between the south and central wings of the house. Symbolic of its master’s dilemma, it was crowded by the president’s antique juggernaut of a Riley on one side and on the other by Costello’s one hundred press-button horsepowers. Maitland found it hard to open the door wide.
In this House, the passenger’s doors of vehicles never had to be swung full-stretch to admit plump or laden wives. The narrow quarters in which the staff parked their cars testified their celibacy.

Maitland put his equipment in the back seat. The hat did not go well with the glasses and neither of them went with the coat, and as far as he was concerned, still feeling gay and conspiratorial to the exclusion of nearly every other emotion, any woman whose sister was brought home drunk by a man wearing all three should have straightaway called for the police. However, he put suede shoes, hat, glasses, coat, in the passenger’s seat and brought the car, lights out, to the main door.

There was no one in the downstairs parlour or the library. Upstairs, the washroom was empty, though the lights burned wide-awake. Maitland grinned at them as no Christian should. Eight cents extra on Nolan’s electricity bill. Now that Compline was over, all that could be heard was the typewriter of one of the priests punching out ‘Tertullian’s Theory of Baptism’ or ‘The Meaning of
Kerigma
in St Paul’ for some theological review.

The thirty yards from Egan’s room to the staircase was the only danger. Maitland stood still for a second and listened a last time. It was worth it, he thought, and his heart expanded shamelessly with excitement. Fuelled by esoteric knowledge, the typewriter maintained speed and the urinals seethed in the washroom. On the floor above, some student avoiding starlight or a draught hauled his bed across the floor. But even this merely made the quiet more tangible.

Carrying the woman was what sobered Maitland. On the narrow stairs, he had her by the knees while Egan managed the shoulders. There was an immediacy about her limp body that made sobriety imperative, or at least fitting. Sobriety for its own sake, not for the sake of
chastity. As a youth he had taught himself and been taught a series of celibate’s tricks and had learnt them too well. Now he found it too easy to remember that this woman shared her species with Morna Quinlan, was mortal and menstrual, and would distend with child and decline with child-bearing. He found it too easy to remember that whoever had her had a season’s fruit. Thinking so had generations of celibates succeeded at their trade. Yet Maitland knew that if he wanted the vision of God he must arrive at a more substantial purity than what was provided by these ploys of mental focus.

They wondered how they would get her into the back of the car. It was easier than they feared. After the passage of the stairs, she was willing to fall purring along the length of the seat. Egan covered her with a rug, quickly, and shut the door on her unguardedly feminine groans.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Maitland,’ he said. ‘I could think of no other solution than this.’

Just the same, he took unrepentantly to the wheel and drove fast and with great skill. It must have been midnight by now, but the lit suburbs and highways had not yet succumbed to the Sabbath. After ten minutes the girl woke up, calling, ‘Maurice I want to be sick.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Egan told her gently and drove into a side-street to park.

Being uneasy for her, Maitland didn’t look. Behind both priest’s backs, the lovely woman retched. The cruel sound and crueller reek were terribly intimate in the little car.

She started to cry. ‘Forgive me, Maurice.’

‘It doesn’t matter. But you were very foolish to start drinking.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

Maitland’s stomach began to jump at the stench. He
got his window down and, as the car moved off again, would have thrust his face out into the sweet night, except that that would have reflected on the lady.

She said unevenly, ‘When you’re unhappy enough, you try these queer things. Whisky. You know.’

‘You didn’t go around hotels, did you, Nora?’

‘Celia’s place.’

‘That’s something.’

‘I want to go to sleep, Maurice.’

‘Before you do, Nora, I don’t think it wise to tell Celia you’ve been to the House of Studies. You’d be so pestered. You don’t mind my saying so?’

‘Beg your pardon, Maurice?’ she said after a long time.

‘I say, we won’t tell Celia you’ve been over to the House of Studies,’ Egan repeated slowly.

‘No. Righto.’ She clearly felt much better, but not much more sober. ‘You’re the expert on the morals of white lies, Maurice.’ She giggled.

‘You realize, my motives aren’t cowardly. But you’ll be sick enough tomorrow without having Celia persecuting you. This is a friend of mine called James. James, this is Nora.’

Egan spoke at top voice and could be heard panting at the end of each sentence. It seemed unfair that this dutiful little cleric, wearing on his lapel the badge of a temperance organization which the Irish pungently called ‘The Sacred Thirst’, should have the ordering of such a crisis.

‘James will take you to the door, Nora.’

James is a fool, thought James.

Behind them the woman, nearly asleep, said, ‘Whisky keeps more people going than sanctifying grace does.’

‘You know that’s not true, Nora.’

Nora’s tears began to creak out, but before long she fell asleep.

Egan and Maitland composed a story for the sister. Maitland would, if caught at the door by Celia, explain that he was an acquaintance of Nora’s, that he’d seen her in this state – Egan thought up a likely locality – and brought her home by taxi; yes, taxi was what Celia would have to be told. ‘She knows my car,’ Egan explained. ‘Now you’ll have to be firm with her, James. Simply refuse to tell her more. Pretend to be very angry at her aggressive attitude. Don’t worry, she
will
have an aggressive attitude. Neither of the Tully girls has been lucky in love. Neither. Celia’s separated husband, whom I met once, described her as a castrating bitch.’

Maitland laughed softly at his friend’s unexpected brusqueness.

‘Of course, Nora,’ Egan went on, ‘Nora is a tragedy. And I just know that it will be easier for her, tonight and tomorrow, if her sister doesn’t think she’s been to see me. Celia will pat her shoulder and make her a cup of tea and say, “Look what they’ve driven you to, love.” But if that woman – well, if
she
suspected
my
presence, that I had any part, however passive, in the business … That’s why I say you must be firm, James.’

They were now in a slow stream of cars in the lively-deathly part of the city. Sailors accosted girls, and boys walked hand in hand, and the blue flesh of strippers simpered and risked hernia in dozens of extreme poses in the window displays.

Driving unevenly in low gear, Maurice said further, ‘If I am seen, Celia will not think twice of raising a riot in that street, even at this time of night. It’s not easy to judge people with one adjective, but I think it’s true to say she’s jealous – madly jealous for her sister. She shall protect Nora, even if she protects her to death, as it were.’

Frowning over traffic, Egan’s face stained blue and
gold and orange as the car edged. All the street subsisted in a medium of crude light, light seeming to have at its core an artist’s mistake which successive layers of wash had been unable to remedy. Maitland watched faces, so unassertive under the brash assertiveness of the neons. He said, just for the sake of chatter, ‘All that light. Maurice. Don’t you think it’s a final indecency to go into the lust-rousing business and then light every doorway up like a maharajah’s bathroom?’