The Collar (25 page)

While he was speaking, he heard the parish priest's car set off and knew he was on his way to the Bishop's palace. Then he shaved, and, about eight, Fitzgerald drove up with the coffin in his van. Silently they carried it between them up the stairs. The body was lying decently composed with a simple bandage about the head. Between them they lifted it into the coffin. Fitzgerald looked questioningly at Fogarty and went on his knees. As he said the brief prayer, Fogarty found his voice unsteady and his eyes full of tears. Fitzgerald gave him a pitying look and then rose and dusted his knees.

‘All the same there'll be talk, father,' he said.

‘Maybe not as much as there should be, Jack,' Fogarty said moodily.

‘We'll take him to the chapel, of course?' Fitzgerald went on.

‘Everything in order, Jack. Father Maginnis is gone to see the Bishop.'

‘He couldn't trust the telephone, of course,' Fitzgerald said, stroking his unshaven chin. ‘No fear the Bishop will interfere, though. Father Maginnis is a smart man. You saw him?'

‘I saw him.'

‘No nerves, no hysterics. I saw other people in the same situation. “Oh, Mr Fitzgerald, what am I going to do?” His mind on essential things the whole time. He's an object lesson to us all, father.'

‘You're right, Jack, he is,' Fogarty said despondently.

Suddenly the undertaker's hand shot out and caught him by the upper arm. ‘Forget about it, boy! Forget about it! What else can you do? Why the hell should you break your heart over it?'

Fogarty still had to meet the family. Later that morning, they drove up to the curates' house. The mother was an actressy type and wept a good deal. She wanted somebody to give her a last message, which Fogarty couldn't think up. The sister, a pretty, intense girl, wept a little too, but quietly, with her back turned, while the brother, a young man with a great resemblance to Galvin, said little. Mother and brother accepted without protest the ruling that the coffin was not to be opened, but the sister looked at Fogarty and asked, ‘You don't think I could see him? Alone? I wouldn't be afraid.' When he said the doctor had forbidden it, she turned her back again, and he had an impression that there was a closer link between her and Galvin than between the others and him.

That evening, they brought the body to lie before the altar of the church, and Maginnis received it and said the prayers. The church was crowded, and Fogarty knew with a strange mixture of rejoicing and mortification that the worst was over. Maginnis's master stroke was the new curate, Rowlands, who had arrived within a couple of hours after his own return. He was a tall, thin, ascetic-looking young man, slow-moving and slow-speaking, and Fogarty knew that all eyes were on him.

Everything went with perfect propriety at the Requiem Mass next morning, and after the funeral Fogarty attended the lunch given by Maginnis to the visiting clergy. He almost laughed out loud when he heard Maginnis ask in a low voice, ‘Father Healy, did I ever tell you the story of Canon Murphy and the Pope?' All that would follow would be the mourning card with the picture of Galvin and the Gothic lettering that said ‘Ecce Sacerdos Magnus.' There was no danger of a scandal any longer. Carmody would not talk. Fitzgerald would not talk either. None of the five people involved would. Father Galvin might have spared himself the trouble.

As they returned from the church together, Fogarty tried to talk to the new curate about what had happened, but he soon realised that the whole significance of it had escaped Rowlands, and that Rowlands thought he was only overdramatising it all. Anybody would think he was overdramatising it, except Carmody. After his supper he would go to the doctor's house, and they would talk about it. Only Carmody would really understand what it was they had done between them. No one else would.

What lonely lives we live, he thought unhappily.

T
HE
M
ASS
I
SLAND

W
HEN FATHER JACKSON DROVE UP
to the curates' house, it was already drawing on to dusk, the early dusk of late December. The curates' house was a red-brick building on a terrace at one side of the ugly church in Asragh. Father Hamilton seemed to have been waiting for him and opened the front door himself, looking white and strained. He was a tall young man with a long melancholy face that you would have taken for weak till you noticed the cut of the jaw.

‘Oh, come in, Jim,' he said with his mournful smile. ‘'Tisn't much of a welcome we have for you, God knows. I suppose you'd like to see poor Jerry before the undertaker comes.'

‘I might as well,' Father Jackson replied briskly. There was nothing melancholy about Jackson, but he affected an air of surprise and shock. ‘'Twas very sudden, wasn't it?'

‘Well, it was and it wasn't, Jim,' Father Hamilton said, closing the front door behind him. ‘He was going downhill since he got the first heart attack, and he wouldn't look after himself. Sure, you know yourself what he was like.'

Jackson knew. Father Fogarty and himself had been friends of a sort, for years. An impractical man, excitable and vehement, Fogarty could have lived for twenty years with his ailment, but instead of that, he allowed himself to become depressed and indifferent. If he couldn't live as he had always lived, he would prefer not to live at all.

They went upstairs and into the bedroom where he was. The character was still plain on the stern, dead face, though, drained of vitality, it had the look of a studio portrait. That bone structure was something you'd have picked out of a thousand faces as Irish, with its odd impression of bluntness and asymmetry, its jutting brows and craggy chin, and the snub nose that looked as though it had probably been broken twenty years before in a public-house row.

When they came downstairs again, Father Hamilton produced half a bottle of whiskey.

‘Not for me, thanks,' Jackson said hastily. ‘Unless you have a drop of sherry there?'

‘Well, there is some Burgundy,' Father Hamilton said. ‘I don't know is it any good, though.'

‘'Twill do me fine,' Jackson replied cheerfully, reflecting that Ireland was the country where nobody knew whether Burgundy was good or not. ‘You're coming with us tomorrow, I suppose?'

‘Well, the way it is, Jim,' Father Hamilton replied, ‘I'm afraid neither of us is going. You see, they're burying poor Jerry here.'

‘They're what?' Jackson asked incredulously.

‘Now, I didn't know for sure when I rang you, Jim, but that's what the brother decided, and that's what Father Hanafey decided as well.'

‘But he told you he wanted to be buried on the Mass Island, didn't he?'

‘He told everybody, Jim,' Father Hamilton replied with growing excitement and emotion. ‘That was the sort he was. If he told one, he told five hundred. Only half an hour ago I had a girl on the telephone from the island asking when they could expect us. You see, the old parish priest of the place let Jerry mark out the grave for himself, and they want to know should they open it. But now the old parish priest is dead as well, and of course Jerry left nothing in writing.'

‘Didn't he leave a will, even?' Jackson asked in surprise.

‘Well, he did and he didn't, Jim,' Father Hamilton said, looking as if he were on the point of tears. ‘Actually, he did make a will about five or six years ago, and he gave it to Clancy, the other curate, but Clancy went off on the Foreign Mission and God alone knows where he is now. After that, Jerry never bothered his head about it. I mean, you have to admit the man had nothing to leave. Every damn thing he had he gave away – even the old car – after he got the first attack. If there was any loose cash around, I suppose the brother has that.'

Jackson sipped his Burgundy, which was even more Australian than he had feared, and wondered at his own irritation. He had been irritated enough before that, with the prospect of two days' motoring in the middle of winter, and a night in a godforsaken pub in the mountains, a hundred and fifty miles away at the other side of Ireland. There, in one of the lakes, was an island where in Cromwell's time, before the causeway and the little oratory were built, Mass was said in secret, and it was here that Father Fogarty had wanted to be buried. It struck Jackson as sheer sentimentality; it wasn't even as if it was Fogarty's native place. Jackson had once allowed Fogarty to lure him there, and had hated every moment of it. It wasn't only the discomfort of the public-house, where meals erupted at any hour of the day or night as the spirit took the proprietor, or the rain that kept them confined to the cold dining-and-sitting room that looked out on the gloomy mountainside, with its couple of whitewashed cabins on the shore of the lake. It was the overintimacy of it all, and this was the thing that Father Fogarty apparently loved. He liked to stand in his shirtsleeves behind the bar, taking turns with the proprietor, who was one of his many friends, serving big pints of porter to rough mountainy men, or to sit in their cottages, shaking in all his fat whenever they told broad stories or sang risky folk songs. ‘God, Jim, isn't it grand?' he would say in his deep voice, and Jackson would look at him over his spectacles with what Fogarty called his ‘Jesuitical' look, and say, ‘Well, I suppose it all depends on what you really like, Jerry.' He wasn't even certain that the locals cared for Father Fogarty's intimacy; on the contrary, he had a strong impression that they much preferred their own reserved old parish priest, whom they never saw except twice a year, when he came up the valley to collect his dues. That had made Jackson twice as stiff. And yet now when he found out that the plans that had meant so much inconvenience to him had fallen through, he was as disappointed as though they had been his own.

‘Oh, well,' he said with a shrug that was intended to conceal his perturbation, ‘I suppose it doesn't make much difference where they chuck us when our time comes.'

‘The point is, it mattered to Jerry, Jim,' Father Hamilton said with his curious, shy obstinacy. ‘God knows, it's not anything that will ever worry me, but it haunted him, and somehow, you know, I don't feel it's right to flout a dead man's wishes.'

‘Oh, I know, I know,' Jackson said lightly. ‘I suppose I'd better talk to old Hanafey about it. Knowing I'm a friend of the Bishop's, he might pay more attention to me.'

‘He might, Jim,' Father Hamilton replied sadly, looking away over Jackson's head. ‘As you say, knowing you're a friend of the Bishop's, he might. But I wouldn't depend too much on it. I talked to him till I was black in the face, and all I got out of him was the law and the rubrics. It's the brother Hanafey is afraid of. You'll see him this evening, and between ourselves, he's a tough customer. Of course, himself and Jerry never had much to say to one another, and he'd be the last man in the world that Jerry would talk to about his funeral, so now he doesn't want the expense and inconvenience. You wouldn't blame him, of course. I'd probably be the same myself. By the way,' Father Hamilton added, lowering his voice, ‘before he does come, I'd like you to take a look round Jerry's room and see is there any little memento you'd care to have – a photo or a book or anything.'

They went into Father Fogarty's sitting room, and Jackson looked at it with a new interest. He knew of old the rather handsome library – Fogarty had been a man of many enthusiasms, though none of long duration – the picture of the Virgin and Child in Irish country costume over the mantelpiece, which some of his colleagues had thought irreverent, and the couple of fine old prints. There was a newer picture that Jackson had not seen – a charcoal drawing of the Crucifixion from a fifteenth-century Irish tomb, which was brutal but impressive.

‘Good Lord!' Jackson exclaimed with a sudden feeling of loss: ‘He really had taste, hadn't he?'

‘He had, Jim,' Father Hamilton said, sticking his long nose into the picture. ‘This goes to a young couple called Keneally, outside the town, that he was fond of. I think they were very kind to him. Since he had the attack, he was pretty lonely, I'd say.'

‘Oh, aren't we all, attack or no attack,' Jackson said almost irritably.

Father Hanafey, the parish priest of Asragh, was a round, red, cherubic-looking old man with a bald head and big round glasses. His house was on the same terrace as the curates'. He, too, insisted on producing the whiskey Jackson so heartily detested when the two priests came in to consult him, but Jackson had decided that this time diplomacy required he should show proper appreciation of the dreadful stuff. He felt sure he was going to be very sick next day. He affected great astonishment at the quality of Father Hanafey's whiskey, and first the old parish priest grew shy, like a schoolgirl whose good looks are being praised, then he looked self-satisfied, and finally he became almost emotional. It was a great pleasure, he said, to meet a young priest with a proper understanding of whiskey. Priests no longer seemed to have the same taste, and as far as most of them were concerned, they might as well be drinking poteen. It was only when it was seven years old that Irish began to be interesting, and that was when you had to catch it and store it in sherry casks to draw off what remained of crude alcohol in it, and give it that beautiful roundness that Father Jackson had spotted. But it shouldn't be kept too long, for somewhere along the line the spirit of a whiskey was broken. At ten, or maybe twelve, years old it was just right. But people were losing their palates. He solemnly assured the two priests that of every dozen clerics who came to his house not more than one would realise what he was drinking. Poor Hamilton grew red and began to stutter, but the parish priest's reproofs were not directed at him.

‘It isn't you I'm talking about, Father Hamilton, but elderly priests, parish priests, and even canons, that you would think would know better, and I give you my word, I put the two whiskeys side by side in front of them, the shop stuff and my own, and they could not tell the difference.'