The Collar (22 page)

But he did not understand the irremediable. He had to have someone to talk to, and for want of a better, rang up Jackson, a curate who had been Devine's other friend. He did not really like Jackson, who was worldly, cynical and something of a careerist, and he usually called him by the worst name in his vocabulary – a Jesuit. Several times he had asked Devine what he saw in Jackson but Devine's replies had not enlightened him much. ‘I wouldn't trust myself too far with the young Loyola if I were you,' Fogarty had told Devine with his worldly swagger. Now, he had no swagger left.

‘That's terrible news about Devine, Jim, isn't it?' he said.

‘Yes,' Jackson drawled in his usual cautious, cagey way, as though he were afraid to commit himself even about that. ‘I suppose it's a happy release for the poor devil.'

That was the sort of tone that maddened Fogarty. It sounded as though Jackson were talking of an old family pet who had been sent to the vet's.

‘I hope he appreciates it,' he said gruffly. ‘I was thinking of going to Dublin and coming back with the funeral. You wouldn't come, I suppose?'

‘I don't very well see how I could, Jerry,' Jackson replied in a tone of mild alarm. ‘It's only a week since I was up last.'

‘Ah, well, I'll go myself,' said Fogarty. ‘You don't know what happened him, do you?'

‘Ah, well, he was always anaemic,' Jackson said lightly. ‘He should have looked after himself, but he didn't get much chance with old O'Leary.'

‘He wasn't intended to,' Fogarty said darkly, indiscreet as usual.

‘What?' Jackson asked in surprise. ‘Oh no,' he added, resuming his worldly tone. ‘It wasn't a sinecure, of course. He was fainting all over the shop. Last time was in the middle of Mass. By then, of course, it was too late. When I saw him last week I knew he was dying.'

‘You saw him last week?' Fogarty repeated.

‘Oh, just for a few minutes. He couldn't talk much.'

And again, the feeling of his own inadequacy descended on Fogarty. He realised that Jackson, who seemed to have as much feeling as a mowing machine, had kept in touch with Devine, and gone out of his way to see him at the end, while he, the devoted, warm-hearted friend, had let him slip from sight into eternity and was now wallowing in the sense of his own loss.

‘I'll never forgive myself, Jim,' he said humbly. ‘I never even knew he was sick.'

‘I'd like to go to the funeral myself if I could,' said Jackson. ‘I'll ring you up later if I can manage it.'

He did manage it, and that evening they set off in Fogarty's car for the city. They stayed in an old hotel in a side-street where porters and waiters all knew them. Jackson brought Fogarty to a very pleasant restaurant for dinner. The very sight of Jackson had been enough to renew Fogarty's doubts. He was a tall, thin man with a prim, watchful, clerical air, and he knew his way around. He spent at least ten minutes over the menu and the wine list, and the head waiter danced attendance on him as head waiters do only when they are either hopeful or intimidated.

‘You needn't bother about me,' Fogarty said to cut short the rigmarole. ‘I'm having steak.'

‘Father Fogarty is having steak, Paddy,' Jackson said suavely, looking at the head waiter over his spectacles with what Fogarty called his ‘Jesuit' air. ‘Make it rare. And stout, I fancy. It's a favourite beverage of the natives.'

‘I'll spare you the stout,' Fogarty said, enjoying the banter. ‘Red wine will do me fine.'

‘Mind, Paddy,' Jackson said in the same tone, ‘Father Fogarty said
red
wine. You're in Ireland now, remember.'

Next morning they went to the parish church where the coffin was resting on trestles before the altar. Beside it, to Fogarty's surprise, was a large wreath of roses. When they got up from their knees, Devine's uncle, Ned, had arrived with his son. Ned was a broad-faced, dark-haired, nervous man, with the anaemic complexion of the family.

‘I'm sorry for your trouble, Ned,' said Fogarty.

‘I know that, father,' said Ned.

‘I don't know if you know Father Jackson. He was a great friend of Father Willie's.'

‘I heard him speak of him,' said Ned. ‘He talked a lot about the pair of ye. Ye were his great friends. Poor Father Willie!' he added with a sigh. ‘He had few enough.'

Just then the parish priest came in and spoke to Ned Devine. His name was Martin. He was a tall man with a stern, unlined, wooden face and candid blue eyes like a baby's. He stood for a few minutes by the coffin, then studied the breastplate and wreath, looking closely at the tag. It was only then that he beckoned the two younger priests towards the door.

‘Tell me, what are we going to do about that thing?' he asked with a professional air.

‘What thing?' Fogarty asked in surprise.

‘The wreath,' Martin replied with a nod over his shoulder.

‘What's wrong with it?'

‘'Tis against the rubrics,' replied the parish priest in the complacent tone of a policeman who has looked up the law on the subject.

‘For heaven's sake, what have the rubrics to do with it?' Fogarty asked impatiently.

‘The rubrics have a whole lot to do with it,' Martin replied with a stern glance. ‘And, apart from that, 'tis a bad custom.'

‘You mean Masses bring in more money?' Fogarty asked with amused insolence.

‘I do not mean Masses bring in more money,' replied Martin, who tended to answer every remark verbatim, like a solicitor's letter. It added to the impression of woodenness he gave. ‘I mean that flowers are a pagan survival.' He looked at the two young priests with the same anxious, innocent, wooden air. ‘And here am I, week in, week out, preaching against flowers, and a blooming big wreath of them in my own church. And on a priest's coffin, what's more! What am I to say about that?'

‘Who asked you to say anything?' Fogarty asked angrily. ‘The man wasn't from your diocese.'

‘Now, that's all very well,' said Martin. ‘That's bad enough by itself, but it isn't the whole story.'

‘You mean because it's from a woman?' Jackson broke in lightly in a tone that would have punctured any pose less substantial than Martin's.

‘I mean, because it's from a woman, exactly.'

‘A woman!' said Fogarty in astonishment. ‘Does it say so?'

‘It does not say so.'

‘Then how do you know?'

‘Because it's red roses.'

‘And does that mean it's from a woman?'

‘What else could it mean?'

‘I suppose it could mean it's from somebody who didn't study the language of flowers the way you seem to have done,' Fogarty snapped.

He could feel Jackson's disapproval of him weighing on the air, but when Jackson spoke it was at the parish priest that his coldness and nonchalance were directed.

‘Oh, well,' he said with a shrug. ‘I'm afraid we know nothing about it, father. You'll have to make up your own mind.'

‘I don't like doing anything when I wasn't acquainted with the man,' Martin grumbled, but he made no further attempt to interfere, and one of the undertaker's men took the wreath and put in on the hearse. Fogarty controlled himself with difficulty. As he banged open the door of his car and started the engine his face was flushed. He drove with his head bowed and his brows jutting down like rocks over his eyes. It was what Devine had called his Nero look. As they cleared the main streets he burst out.

‘That's the sort of thing that makes me ashamed of myself, Jim. Flowers are a pagan survival! And they take it from him, what's worse. They take it from him. They listen to that sort of stuff instead of telling him to shut his big ignorant gob.'

‘Oh, well,' Jackson said tolerantly, taking out his pipe, ‘we're hardly being fair to him. After all, he didn't know Devine.'

‘But that only makes it worse,' Fogarty said hotly. ‘Only for our being there he'd have thrown out that wreath. And for what? His own dirty, mean, suspicious mind!'

‘Ah, I wouldn't go as far as that,' Jackson said, frowning. ‘I think in his position I'd have asked somebody to take it away.'

‘You would?'

‘Wouldn't you?'

‘But why, in God's name?'

‘Oh, I suppose I'd be afraid of the scandal – I'm not a very courageous type.'

‘Scandal?'

‘Whatever you like to call it. After all, some woman sent it.'

‘Yes. One of Devine's old maids.'

‘Have you ever heard of an old maid sending a wreath of red roses to a funeral?' Jackson asked, raising his brows, his head cocked.

‘To tell you the God's truth, I might have done it myself,' Fogarty confessed with boyish candour. ‘It would never have struck me that there was anything wrong with it.'

‘It would have struck the old maid all right, though.'

Fogarty turned his eyes for a moment to stare at Jackson. Jackson was staring back. Then he missed a turning and reversed with a muttered curse. To the left of them the Wicklow mountains stretched away southwards, and between the grey walls the fields were a ragged brilliant green under the tattered sky.

‘You're not serious, Jim?' he said after a few minutes.

‘Oh, I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong,' Jackson said, gesturing widely with his pipe. ‘Women get ideas. We all know that.'

‘These things can happen in very innocent ways,' Fogarty said with ingenuous solemnity. Then he scowled again and a blush spread over his handsome craggy face. Like all those who live mainly in their imaginations, he was always astonished and shocked at the suggestions that reached him from the outside world: he could live with his fantasies only by assuming that they were nothing more. Jackson, whose own imagination was curbed and even timid, who never went at things like a thoroughbred at a gate, watched him with amusement and a certain envy. Just occasionally he felt that he himself would have liked to welcome a new idea with that boyish wonder and panic.

‘I can't believe it,' Fogarty said angrily, tossing his head.

‘You don't have to,' Jackson replied, nursing his pipe and swinging round in the seat with his arm close to Fogarty's shoulder. ‘As I say, women get these queer ideas. There's usually nothing in them. At the same time, I must say
I
wouldn't be very scandalised if I found out that there was something in it. If ever a man needed someone to care for him, Devine did in the last year or two.'

‘But not Devine, Jim,' Fogarty said, raising his voice. ‘Not Devine! You could believe a thing like that about me. I suppose I could believe it about you. But I knew Devine since we were kids, and he wouldn't be capable of it.'

‘I never knew him in that way,' Jackson admitted. ‘In fact, I scarcely knew him at all, really. But I'd have said he was as capable of it as the rest of us. He was lonelier than the rest of us.'

‘God, don't I know it?' Fogarty said in sudden self-reproach. ‘I could understand if it was drink.'

‘Oh, not drink!' Jackson said with distaste. ‘He was too fastidious. Can you imagine him in the
DTS
like some old parish priest, trying to strangle the nurses?'

‘But that's what I say, Jim. He wasn't the type.'

‘Oh, you must make distinctions,' said Jackson. ‘I could imagine him attracted by some intelligent woman. You know yourself how he'd appeal to her, the same way he appealed to us, a cultured man in a country town. I don't have to tell you the sort of life an intelligent woman leads, married to some lout of a shopkeeper or a gentleman farmer. Poor devils, it's a mercy that most of them aren't educated.'

‘He didn't give you any hint who she was?' Fogarty asked incredulously. Jackson had spoken with such conviction that it impressed him as true.

‘Oh, I don't even know if there was such a woman,' Jackson said hastily, and then he blushed too. Fogarty remained silent. He knew now that Jackson had been talking about himself, not Devine.

As the country grew wilder and furze bushes and ruined keeps took the place of pastures and old abbeys, Fogarty found his eyes attracted more and more to the wreath that swayed lightly with the hearse, the only spot of pure colour in the whole landscape with its watery greens and blues and greys. It seemed an image of the essential mystery of a priest's life. What, after all, did he really know of Devine? Only what his own temperament suggested, and mostly – when he wasn't being St Francis of Assisi – he had seen himself as the worldly one of the pair, the practical, coarse-grained man who cut corners, and Devine as the saint, racked by the fastidiousness and asceticism that exploded in his bitter little jests. Now his mind boggled at the idea of the agony that alone could have driven Devine into an entanglement with a woman; yet the measure of his incredulity was that of the conviction he would presently begin to feel. When once an unusual idea broke through his imagination, he hugged it, brooded on it, promoted it to the dignity of a revelation.

‘God, don't we lead terrible lives?' he burst out at last. ‘Here we are, probably the two people in the world who knew Devine best, and even we have no notion what that thing in front of us means.'

‘Which might be as well for our peace of mind,' said Jackson.

‘I'll engage it did damn little for Devine's,' Fogarty said grimly. It was peculiar; he did not believe yet in the reality of the woman behind the wreath, but already he hated her.

‘Oh, I don't know,' Jackson said in some surprise. ‘Isn't that what we all really want from life?'

‘Is it?' Fogarty asked in wonder. He had always thought of Jackson as a cold fish, and suddenly found himself wondering about that as well. After all, there must have been something in him that attracted Devine. He had the feeling that Jackson, who was, as he recognised, by far the subtler man, was probing him, and for the same reason. Each was looking in the other for the quality that had attracted Devine, and which, having made him their friend, might make them friends also. Each was trying to see how far he could go with the other. Fogarty, as usual, was the first with a confession.