The Collar (23 page)

‘I couldn't do it, Jim,' he said earnestly. ‘I was never even tempted, except once, and then it was the wife of one of the men who was in the seminary with me. I was crazy about her. But when I saw what her marriage to the other fellow was like, I changed my mind. She hated him like poison, Jim. I soon saw she might have hated me in the same way. It's only when you see what marriage is really like, as we do, that you realise how lucky we are.'

‘Lucky?' Jackson repeated mockingly.

‘Aren't we?'

‘Did you ever know a seminary that wasn't full of men who thought they were lucky? They might be drinking themselves to death, but they never doubted their luck? Nonsense, man! Anyway, why do you think she'd have hated you?'

‘I don't,' Fogarty replied with a boyish laugh. ‘Naturally, I think I'd have been the perfect husband for her. That's the way Nature kids you.'

‘Well, why shouldn't you have made her a perfect husband?' Jackson asked quizzically. ‘There's nothing much wrong with you that I can see. Though I admit I can see you better as a devoted father.'

‘God knows you might be right,' Fogarty said, his face clouding again. It was as changeable as an Irish sky, Jackson thought with amusement. ‘You could get on well enough without the woman, but the kids are hell. She had two. “Father Fogey” they used to call me. And my mother was as bad,' he burst out. ‘She was wrapped up in the pair of us. She always wanted us to be better than everybody else, and when we weren't she used to cry. She said it was the Fogarty blood breaking out in us – the Fogartys were all horse dealers.' His handsome, happy face was black with all the old remorse and guilt. ‘I'm afraid she died under the impression that I was a Fogarty after all.'

‘If the Fogartys are any relation to the Martins, I'd say it was most unlikely,' Jackson said, half amused, half touched.

‘I never knew till she was dead how much she meant to me,' Fogarty said broodingly. ‘Hennessey warned me not to take the Burial Service myself, but I thought it was the last thing I could do for her. He knew what he was talking about, of course. I disgraced myself, bawling like a blooming kid, and he pushed me aside and finished it for me. My God, the way we gallop through that till it comes to our own turn! Every time I've read it since, I've read it as if it were for my mother.'

Jackson shook his head uncomprehendingly.

‘You feel these things more than I do,' he said. ‘I'm a cold fish.'

It struck Fogarty with some force that this was precisely what he had always believed himself and that now he could believe it no longer.

‘Until then, I used to be a bit flighty,' he confessed. ‘After that I knew it wasn't in me to care for another woman.'

‘That's only more of your nonsense,' said Jackson impatiently. ‘Love is just one thing, not half a dozen. If I were a young fellow looking for a wife I'd go after some girl who felt like that about her father. You probably have too much of it. I haven't enough. When I was in Manister there was a shopkeeper's wife I used to see. I talked to her and lent her books. She was half crazy with loneliness. Then one morning I got home and found her standing outside my door in the pouring rain. She'd been there half the night. She wanted me to take her away, to “save” her, as she said. You can imagine what happened her after.'

‘Went off with someone else, I suppose?'

‘No such luck. She took to drinking and sleeping with racing men. Sometimes I blame myself for it. I feel I should have kidded her along. But I haven't enough love to go round. You have too much. With your enthusiastic nature you'd probably have run off with her.'

‘I often wondered what I would do,' Fogarty said shyly.

He felt very close to tears. It was partly the wreath, brilliant in the sunlight, that had drawn him out of his habitual reserve and made him talk in that way with a man of even greater reserve. Partly, it was the emotion of returning to the little town where he had grown up. He hated and avoided it; it seemed to him to represent all the narrowness and meanness that he tried to banish from his thoughts, but at the same time it contained all the nostalgia and violence he had felt there; and when he drew near it again a tumult of emotions rose in him that half strangled him. He was watching for it already like a lover.

‘There it is!' he said triumphantly, pointing to a valley where a tapering Franciscan tower rose on the edge of a clutter of low Georgian houses and thatched cabins. ‘They'll be waiting for us at the bridge. That's how they'll be waiting for me when my turn comes, Jim.'

A considerable crowd had gathered at the farther side of the bridge to escort the hearse to the cemetery. Four men shouldered the shiny coffin over the bridge past the ruined castle and up the hilly Main Street. Shutters were up on the shop fronts, blinds were drawn, everything was at a standstill except where a curtain was lifted and an old woman peered out.

‘Counting the mourners,' Fogarty said with a bitter laugh. ‘They'll say I had nothing like as many as Devine. That place,' he added, lowering his voice, ‘the second shop from the corner, that was ours.'

Jackson took it in at a glance. He was puzzled and touched by Fogarty's emotion because there was nothing to distinguish the little market town from a hundred others. A laneway led off the hilly road and they came to the abbey, a ruined tower and a few walls, with tombstones sown thickly in choir and nave. The hearse was already drawn up outside and people had gathered in a semicircle about it. Ned Devine came hastily up to the car where the two priests were donning their vestments. Fogarty knew at once that there was trouble brewing.

‘Whisper, Father Jerry,' Ned muttered in a strained, excited voice. ‘People are talking about that wreath. I wonder would you know who sent it?'

‘I don't know the first thing about it, Ned,' Fogarty replied, and suddenly his heart began to beat violently.

‘Come here a minute, Sheela,' Ned called, and a tall, pale girl with the stain of tears on her long bony face left the little group of mourners and joined them. Fogarty nodded to her. She was Devine's sister, a schoolteacher who had never married. ‘This is Father Jackson, Father Willie's other friend. They don't know anything about it either.'

‘Then I'd let them take it back,' she said doggedly.

‘What would you say, father?' Ned asked, appealing to Fogarty, and suddenly Fogarty felt his courage desert him. In disputing with Martin he had felt himself an equal on neutral ground, but now the passion and prejudice of the little town seemed to rise up and oppose him, and he felt himself again a boy, rebellious and terrified. You had to know the place to realise the hysteria that could be provoked by something like a funeral.

‘I can only tell you what I told Father Martin already,' he said, growing red and angry.

‘Did he talk about it too?' Ned asked sharply.

‘There!' Sheela said vindictively. ‘What did I tell you?'

‘Well, the pair of you are cleverer than I am,' Fogarty said. ‘I saw nothing wrong with it.'

‘It was no proper thing to send to a priest's funeral,' she hissed with prim fury. ‘And whoever sent it was no friend of my brother.'

‘You saw nothing wrong with it, father?' Ned prompted appealingly.

‘But I tell you, Uncle Ned, if that wreath goes into the graveyard we'll be the laughing stock of the town,' she said in an old-maidish frenzy. ‘I'll throw it out myself if you won't.'

‘Whisht, girl, whisht, and let Father Jerry talk!' Ned said furiously.

‘It's entirely a matter for yourselves, Ned,' Fogarty said excitedly. He was really scared now. He knew he was in danger of behaving imprudently in public, and sooner or later, the story would get back to the Bishop, and it would be suggested that he knew more than he pretended.

‘If you'll excuse me interrupting, father,' Jackson said suavely, giving Fogarty a warning glance over his spectacles. ‘I know this is none of my business.'

‘Not at all, father, not at all,' Ned said passionately. ‘You were the boy's friend. All we want is for you to tell us what to do.'

‘Oh, well, Mr Devine, that would be too great a responsibility for me to take,' Jackson replied with a cagey smile, though Fogarty saw that his face was very flushed. ‘Only someone who really knows the town could advise you about that. I only know what things are like in my own place. Of course, I entirely agree with Miss Devine,' he said, giving her a smile that suggested that this, like crucifixion, was something he preferred to avoid. ‘Naturally, Father Fogarty and I have discussed it already. I think personally that it was entirely improper to send a wreath.' Then his mild, clerical voice suddenly grew menacing and he shrugged his shoulders with an air of contempt. ‘But, speaking as an outsider, I'd say if you were to send that wreath back from the graveyard, you'd make yourself something far worse than a laughing stock. You'd throw mud on a dead man's name that would never be forgotten for you the longest day you lived … Of course, that's only an outsider's opinion,' he added urbanely, drawing in his breath in a positive hiss.

‘Of course, of course, of course,' Ned Devine said, clicking his fingers and snapping into action. ‘We should have thought of it ourselves, father. 'Twould be giving tongues to the stones.'

Then he lifted the wreath himself and carried it to the graveside. Several of the men by the gate looked at him with a questioning eye and fell in behind him. Some hysteria had gone out of the air. Fogarty gently squeezed Jackson's hand.

‘Good man, Jim!' he said in a whisper. ‘Good man you are!'

He stood with Jackson at the head of the open grave beside the local priests. As their voices rose in the psalms for the dead and their vestments billowed about them, Fogarty's brooding eyes swept the crowd of faces he had known since his childhood and which were now caricatured by age and pain. Each time they came to rest on the wreath which stood at one side of the open grave. It would lie there now above Devine when all the living had gone, his secret. And each time it came over him in a wave of emotion that what he and Jackson had protected was something more than a sentimental token. It was the thing that had linked them to Devine, and for the future would link them to one another – love. Not half a dozen things, but one thing, between son and mother, man and sweetheart, friend and friend.

A
N
A
CT OF
C
HARITY

T
HE PARISH PRIEST
, Father Maginnis, did not like the second curate, Father Galvin, and Father Fogarty could see why. It was the dislike of the professional for the amateur, no matter how talented, and nobody could have said that Father Galvin had much in the way of talent. Maginnis was a professional to his fingertips. He drove the right car, knew the right people, and could suit his conversation to any company, even that of women. He even varied his accent to make people feel at home. With Deasy, the owner of the garage, he talked about ‘the caw', but to Lavin, the garage hand, he said ‘the cyarr', smiling benignly at the homeliness of his touch.

Galvin was thin, pale, irritable, and intense. When he should have kept a straight face he made some stupid joke that stopped the conversation dead; and when he laughed in the proper place at someone else's joke, it was with a slight air of vexation, as though he found it hard to put up with people who made him laugh at all. He worried himself over little embarrassments and what people would think of them, till Fogarty asked bluntly, ‘What the hell difference does it make what they think?' Then Galvin looked away sadly and said, ‘I suppose you're right.'

But Fogarty didn't mind his visits so much except when he had asked other curates in for a drink and a game of cards. Then he took a glass of sherry or something equally harmless and twiddled it awkwardly for half an hour as though it were some sort of patent device for keeping his hands occupied. When one of the curates made a harmless dirty joke, Galvin pretended to be looking at a picture so that he didn't have to comment. Fogarty, who loved giving people nicknames, called him Father Mother's Boy. He called Maginnis the Old Pro, but when that nickname got back, as everything a priest says gets back, it did Fogarty no harm at all. Maginnis was glad he had a curate with so much sense.

He sometimes asked Fogarty to Sunday dinner, but he soon gave up on asking Galvin, and again Fogarty sympathised with him. Maginnis was a professional, even to his dinners. He basted his meat with one sort of wine and his chickens with another, and he liked a guest who could tell the difference. He also liked him to drink two large whiskeys before dinner and to make sensible remarks about the wine; and when he had exhausted the secrets of his kitchen he sat back, smoked his cigar, and told funny stories. They were very good stories, mostly about priests.

‘Did I ever tell you the one about Canon Murphy, father?' he would bellow, his fat face beaming. ‘Ah, that's damn good. Canon Murphy went on a pilgrimage to Rome, and when he came back he preached a sermon on it. “So I had a special audience with His Holiness, dearly beloved brethren, and he asked me, ‘Canon Murphy, where are you now?' ‘I'm in Dromod, Your Holiness,' said I. ‘What sort of a parish is it, Canon Murphy?' says he. ‘Ah, 'tis a nice, snug little parish, Your Holiness,' says I. ‘Are they a good class of people?' says he. ‘Well, they're not bad, Your Holiness,' said I. ‘Are they good-living people?' says he. ‘Well, they're as good as the next, Your Holiness,' says I. ‘Except when they'd have a drop taken.' ‘Tell me, Canon Murphy,' says he, ‘do they pay their dues?' And like that, I was nearly struck dumb. ‘There you have me, Your Holiness!' says I. ‘There you have me!'”'

At heart Fogarty thought Maginnis was a bit of a sham and that most of his stories were fabrications; but he never made the mistake of underestimating him, and he enjoyed the feeling Maginnis gave him of belonging to a group, and that of the best kind – well balanced, humane, and necessary.