The Collar (20 page)

‘Oh, I know he's completely unreasonable,' she stammered. ‘He always was.'

‘But you didn't say anything to him, did you?' Fogarty asked anxiously.

‘About what?' she asked in surprise, looking up at him and blinking back her tears.

‘About me?' Fogarty mumbled in embarrassment.

‘Oh, he doesn't know about that,' Una replied frantically. ‘I never mentioned that to him at all. Besides, he doesn't care that much about me.'

And Fogarty realised that in the simplest way in the world he had been brought to admit to a married woman that he loved her and she to imply that she felt the same about him, without a word being said on either side. Obviously, these things happened more innocently that he had ever thought possible. He became more embarrassed than ever.

‘But what is he jealous of so?' he added truculently.

‘He's jealous of you because you're a priest. Surely, you saw that?'

‘I certainly didn't. It never crossed my mind.'

Yet at the same time he wondered if this might not be the reason for the censoriousness he sometimes felt in Whitton against his harmless bets and his bottles of wine.

‘But he's hardly ever out of your house, and he's always borrowing your books, and talking theology and Church history to you. He has shelves of them here – look!' And she pointed at a plain wooden bookcase, filled with solid-looking works. ‘In my b-b-bedroom! That's why he really hates Father Whelan. Don't you see, Jerry,' she said, calling him for the first time by his Christian name, ‘you have all the things he wants.'

‘I have?' repeated Fogarty in astonishment. ‘What things?'

‘Oh, how do I know?' she replied with a shrug, relegating these to the same position as Whelan's bank-balance and his own gadgets, as things that meant nothing to her. ‘Respect and responsibility and freedom from the worries of a family, I suppose.'

‘He's welcome to them,' Fogarty said with wry humour. ‘What's that the advertisements say? – owner having no further use for same.'

‘Oh, I know,' she said with another shrug, and he saw that from the beginning she had realised how he felt about her and been sorry for him. He was sure that there was some contradiction here which he should be able to express to himself, between her almost inordinate piety and her light-hearted acceptance of his adoration for her – something that was exclusively feminine, but which he could not isolate with her there beside him, willing him to make love to her, offering herself to his kiss.

‘It's a change to be kissed by someone who cares for you,' she said after a moment.

‘Ah, now, Una, that's not true,' he protested gravely, the priest in him getting the upper hand of the lover who had still a considerable amount to learn. ‘You only fancy that.'

‘I don't, Jerry,' she replied with conviction. ‘It's always been the same, from the first month of our marriage – always! I was a fool to marry him at all.'

‘Even so,' Fogarty said manfully, doing his duty by his friend with a sort of schoolboy gravity, ‘You know he's still fond of you. That's only his way.'

‘It isn't, Jerry,' she went on obstinately. ‘He wanted to be a priest and I stopped him.'

‘But you didn't.'

‘That's how he looks at it. I tempted him.'

‘And damn glad he was to fall!'

‘But he did fall, Jerry, and that's what he can never forgive. In his heart he despises me and despises himself for not being able to do without me.'

‘But why should he despise himself? That's what I don't understand.'

‘Because I'm only a woman, and he wants to be independent of me and every other woman as well. He has to teach to keep a home for me, and he doesn't want to teach. He wants to say Mass and hear confessions, and be God Almighty for seven days of the week.'

Fogary couldn't grasp it, but he realised that there was something in what she said, and that Whitton was really a lonely, frustrated man who felt he was forever excluded from the only things which interested him.

‘I don't understand it,' he said angrily. ‘It doesn't sound natural to me.'

‘It doesn't sound natural to you because you have it, Jerry,' she said. ‘I used to think Tom wasn't normal, either, but now I'm beginning to think there are more spoiled priests in the world than ever went into seminaries. You see, Jerry,' she went on in a rush, growing very red, ‘I'm a constant reproach to him. He thinks he's a terrible blackguard because he wants to make love to me once a month … I can talk like this to you because you're a priest.'

‘You can, to be sure,' said Fogarty with more conviction than he felt.

‘And even when he does make love to me,' she went on, too full of her grievance even to notice the anguish she caused him, ‘he manages to make me feel that I'm doing all the love-making.'

‘And why shouldn't you?' asked Fogarty gallantly, concealing the way his heart turned over in him.

‘Because it's a sin!' she cried tempestuously.

‘Who said it's a sin?'

‘He makes it a sin. He's like a bear with a sore head for days after. Don't you see, Jerry,' she cried, springing excitedly to her feet and shaking her head at him, ‘it's never anything but adultery with him, and he goes away and curses himself because he hasn't the strength to resist it.'

‘Adultery?' repeated Fogarty, the familiar word knocking at his conscience as if it were Tom Whitton himself at the door.

‘Whatever you call it,' Una rushed on. ‘It's always adultery, adultery, adultery, and I'm always a bad woman, and he always wants to show God that it wasn't him but me, and I'm sick and tired of it. I want a man to make me feel like a respectable married woman for once in my life. You see, I feel quite respectable with you, although I know I shouldn't.' She looked in the mirror of the dressing-table and her face fell. ‘Oh, Lord!' she sighed. ‘I don't look it … I'll be down in two minutes now, Jerry,' she said eagerly, thrusting out her lips to him, her old, brilliant, excitable self.

‘You're grand,' he muttered.

As she went into the bathroom, she turned in another excess of emotion and threw her arms about him. As he kissed her, she pressed herself close to him till his head swam. There was a mawkish, girlish grin on her face. ‘Darling!' she said in an agony of passion, and it was as if their loneliness enveloped them like a cloud.

T
HE
T
EACHER'S
M
ASS

F
ATHER FOGARTY
, the curate in Crislough, used to say in his cynical way that his greatest affliction was having to serve the teacher's Mass every morning. He referred, of course, to his own Mass, the curate's Mass, which was said early so that Father Fogarty could say Mass later in Costello. Nobody ever attended it, except occasionally in summer, when there were visitors at the hotel. The schoolteacher, old Considine, served as acolyte. He had been serving the early Mass long before Fogarty came, and the curate thought he would also probably be doing it long after he had left. Every morning, you saw him coming up the village street, a pedantically attired old man with a hollow face and a big moustache that was turning grey. Everything about him was abstract and angular, even to his voice, which was harsh and without modulation, and sometimes when he and Fogarty came out of the sacristy with Considine leading, carrying the book, his pace was so slow that Fogarty wondered what effect it would have if he gave him one good kick in the behind. It was exactly as Fogarty said – as though
he
was serving Considine's Mass, and the effect of it was to turn Fogarty into a more unruly acolyte than ever he had been in the days when he himself was serving the convent Mass.

Whatever was the cause, Considine always roused a bit of the devil in Fogarty, and he knew that Considine had no great affection for him, either. The old man had been headmaster of the Crislough school until his retirement, and all his life he had kept himself apart from the country people, like a parish priest or a policeman. He was not without learning; he had a quite respectable knowledge of local history, and a very good one of the ecclesiastical history of the Early Middle Ages in its local applications, but it was all book learning, and like his wing collar, utterly unrelated to the life about him. He had all the childish vanity of the man of dissociated scholarship, wrote occasional scurrilous letters to the local paper to correct some error in etymology, and expected everyone on that account to treat him as an oracle. As a schoolmaster he had sneered cruelly at the barefoot urchins he taught, describing them as ‘illiterate peasants' who believed in the fairies and in spells, and when, twenty years later, some of them came back from Boston or Brooklyn and showed off before the neighbours, with their big American hats and high-powered cars, he still sneered at them. According to him, they went away illiterate and came home illiterate.

‘I see young Carmody is home again,' he would say to the curate after Mass.

‘Is that so?'

‘And he has a car like a house,' Considine would add, with bitter amusement. ‘A car with a grin on it. 'Twould do fine to cart home his mother's turf'

‘The blessings of God on him,' the curate would say cheerfully. ‘I wish I had a decent car instead of the old yoke I have.'

‘I dare say it was the fairies,' the old teacher would snarl, with an ugly smile that made his hollow, high-cheeked face look like a skull. ‘It wasn't anything he ever learned here.'

‘Maybe we're not giving the fairies their due, Mr Considine,' said the curate, with the private conviction that it would be easier to learn from them than from the schoolmaster.

The old man's scornful remarks irritated Fogarty because he liked the wild, barefooted, inarticulate brats from the mountainy farms, and felt that if they showed off a bit when they returned from America with a few dollars in their pockets, they were well entitled to do so. Whoever was entitled to the credit, it was nothing and nobody at home. The truth was he had periods of terrible gloom when he felt he had mistaken his vocation. Or, rather the vocation was all right, but the conditions under which he exercised it were all wrong, and those conditions, for him, were well represented by the factitious scholarship of old Considine. It was all in the air. Religion sometimes seemed no more to him than his own dotty old housekeeper, who, whatever he said, invested herself with the authority of a bishop and decided who was to see him and about what, and settled matters on her own whenever she got half a chance. Things were so bad with her that whenever the country people wanted to see him, they bribed one of the acolytes to go and ask him to come himself to their cottages. The law was represented by Sergeant Twomey, who raided the mountain pubs half an hour after closing time, in response to the order of some lunatic superintendent at the other side of the county, while as for culture, there was the library van every couple of months, from which Considine, who acted as librarian, selected a hundred books, mainly for his own amusement. He was partial to books dealing with voyages in the Congo or Tibet (‘Tibet is a very interesting country, father'). The books that were for general circulation he censored to make sure there were no bad words like ‘navel' in them that might corrupt the ignorant ‘peasantry'. And then he came to Fogarty and told him he had been reading a very ‘interesting' book about birdwatcliing in the South Seas, or something like that.

Fogarty's own temptation was toward action and energy, just as his depression was often no more than the expression of his frustration. He was an energetic and emotional man who in other circumstances would probably have become a successful businessman. Women were less of a temptation to him than the thought of an active instinctual life. All he wanted in the way of a holiday was to get rid of his collar and take a gun or rod or stand behind the bar of a country hotel. He ran the local hurling team for what it was worth, which wasn't much, and strayed down the shore with the boatmen or up the hills with the poachers and poteen-makers, who all trusted him and never tried to conceal any of their harmless misdemeanours from him. Once, for instance, in the late evening, he came unexpectedly on a party of scared poteen-makers on top of a mountain and sat down on the edge of the hollow where they were operating their still. ‘Never mind me, lads!' he said, lighting a pipe. ‘I'm not here at all.' ‘Sure we know damn well you're not here, father,' one old man said, and chuckled. ‘But how the hell can we offer a drink to a bloody ghost?'

These were his own people, the people he loved and admired, and it was principally the feeling that he could do little or nothing for them that plunged him into those suicidal fits of gloom in which he took to the bottle. When he heard of a dance being held in a farmhouse without the permission of the priest or the police, he said, ‘The blessings of God on them' – though he had to say it discreetly, for fear it should get back.

Fogarty knew that in the teacher's eyes this was another black mark against him, for old Considine could not understand how any educated man could make so little of the cloth as to sit drinking with ‘illiterate peasants' instead of talking to a fine, well-informed man like himself about the situation in the Far East or the relationship of the Irish dioceses to the old kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages.

Then one evening Fogarty was summoned to the teacher's house on a sick call. It only struck him when he saw it there at the end of the village – a newish, red-brick box of a house, with pebble dash on the front and a steep stairway up from the front door – that it was like the teacher himself. Maisie, the teacher's unmarried daughter, was a small, plump woman with a face that must once have been attractive, for it was still all in curves, with hair about it like Mona Lisa's, though now she had lost all her freshness, and her skin was red and hard and full of wrinkles. She had a sad smile, and Fogarty could not resist a pang of pity for her because he realised that she was probably another victim of Considine's dislike of ‘illiterates'. How could an ‘illiterate' boy come to a house like that, or how could the teacher's daughter go out walking with him?