It was barely six in the morning when I reached the Crag of Cats on the hill. McDowd was up before me, zigzagging suspiciously on the slope with a little black bag the size of a doctor’s satchel in his hand. From where I crouched, the satchel looked like a handbag and McDowd looked like a woman – a woman in man’s clothing with all the alertness of a woman who considers it possible that she is being observed. As he disappeared over the crest, I bounded up the hillside and jouked before I came to the rim. Slowly, I raised my head. The flat, green plateau was empty, and by the look of the grazing sheep no one had recently disturbed them. He had disappeared, it seemed, into thin mountain air.

  I turned my head to make sure he wasn’t behind me and spied a blast of pure blue pipe smoke rising from behind a dry-stone wall on my left. He was obviously jouking too, perhaps hiding whatever treasure he had been carrying in his satchel. I retreated behind a boulder and waited. For what seemed like an hour I lay on my belly with my chin on my forearm and watched the blue smoke rising in little puffs of contentment over the grey coping of the wall. Then, as I was beginning to run out of patience, I saw the back of his cap and the stoop of his shoulders as he set off across the plain towards the next hill. He was still carrying the satchel and walking so jauntily that I wondered if it had become lighter after his lengthy sojourn behind the wall.

  I waited till he had disappeared over the next crest before going to investigate. I made a complicated detour in case I myself was being observed, then I leant over the wall as if by accident and looked down on nothing more incriminating than two spent matches. Like his late master, a worrier and a retentive man. The knowledge gave me confidence, and the confidence enlivened my natural sense of superiority. Why this should be I have no idea. I hadn’t discovered his Achilles’ heel, and neither had I discovered what he was carrying in his satchel. An outrageous thought occurred to me which I banished immediately from my mind.

  Imitating his springy step and meditating the while on the loose-bowelled heroes of history, I set off after him. Beyond the next hill was another little plain, so I decided to keep to the river for cover, as it ran in a deep groove with banks that rose above my head. I made my way upstream, and when I’d reached the second plateau, I peered over the edge of the bank. Again, the dextrous McDowd seemed to have disappeared. And again, I scanned the landscape, scrutinising every shadow in the low sun. Something stirred close to the ground less than two hundred yards away. A man turned on his side as if seeking a more comfortable position. McDowd wasn’t lying on the ground. He was stretched out fully on the Termon Stone.

  For a long time I watched his moving arms and still legs, wondering what on earth he could be up to. I began walking towards him in a semicircle, keeping downwind of him in case he had keen sniffers. Even my enemies will agree that I’m a skilled bog-trotter. I’m sure-footed and light-stepping, a master of fieldcraft who can recognise a quagmire before he puts his foot in it.

  I stood behind him, peering over his shoulder, and he never once sniffed or looked round. He was working a chisel and hammer, carving what looked like hieroglyphics on the Termon Stone and grunting shamelessly with every tap.

  ‘God bless the work since the Devil isn’t in the business of blessing.’

  He didn’t jump but his left leg gave a little twitch as if he had struck the patella instead of the chisel with his hammer.

  ‘I’m trying my hand at lettering,’ he grinned. ‘I hope you approve.’

  He sat up so that I could read the inscription he had just finished.

  Arty Bradley 1941–86

  Many’s the good Rub he had here

  ‘It’s a neat job,’ I said, just to be friendly.

  ‘We should exhume poor Arty and bury him under the Termon Stone. The only sex he ever had was with Mary Rose on this hard and springless bed.’

  ‘Surely a man who lived as he did in New York couldn’t have wanted for life’s necessaries. The sex he had here may have been good but it wasn’t enough to last a lifetime.’

  ‘He told me so himself: “The only sex I ever had was on the Termon Stone.” I suppose the same must be true of Father Johnnie.’

  ‘I’m not my brother’s confessor, I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Arty had the Rub here, and so had Father Johnnie. Arty got the lion’s share, while you and I looked on.’

  ‘Mary Rose had the lioness’s share, even more than the lion.’

  McDowd leant forward over the lettering and blew the dust out of the serifs.

  ‘It was a golden age,’ I said to encourage him. ‘Sex every day before the permissive society was invented.’

  ‘Pity it wasn’t real sex. Even Arty was too young to ejaculate.’

  ‘I’ve had sex on every continent and sex between continents, but the sex I remember before falling asleep at night is the sex I saw on the Termon Stone.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why none of us got married. You’re a bachelor and I’m a bachelor. Arty was a bachelor, and so is Father Johnnie. It must be disturbing for a priest to remember the things that you and I remember every day.’

  I had no wish to comment on the casuistries of the priestly conscience, so I got out my tobacco pouch and filled my pipe. His face was close to mine, a face of bone. McDowd is a man of bone; beneath the skin is as little flesh as bone requires to survive. Now, Arty Bradley was a man of flesh and fat. In the pot of a certain tribe I’ve lived among, I know which of the two would elicit the more positive Pavlovian reaction. Yet McDowd to me is the more interesting man. Cannibalism is not my métier. I’m a white man, I play the white man’s game.

  ‘Some good came of it all,’ I said amicably. ‘Mary Rose, from what I hear, is happy with her millionaire. I’m pleased that she got value for money – or money for value. It’s no more than she deserved.’

  ‘When Helga came, my first thought was to get her to play the Game. I soon realised that things weren’t all that simple. Father Johnnie had cried off the sports list. Then poor old Arty died. Now there’s only you and me.’

  I pretended not to be listening, and to lend verisimilitude to my pretence I relit my pipe with a loud smacking of the lips and an indrawing of cheeks.

  ‘There’s no going back,’ McDowd went on. ‘The Game has taken a serious turn. Now it can only be a twosome.’

  ‘Precisely my sentiments,’ I said coolly.

  ‘Two things remain to be seen. How did Arty Bradley meet his end? Who will lie with Helga on the Termon Stone? They are two questions I think about every day.’

  ‘Will thinking solve them?’

  ‘Thinking solves nothing and neither does play-acting.’

  I knocked out my pipe on the edge of the Termon Stone and blew loudly through the stem. The dottle that flew from the bowl whizzed by his ear with the force of grapeshot, and he didn’t so much as blink. He saw it as a declaration of war, and I couldn’t tell him that it was unintentional. As a man who has lived in savage societies, I have learnt never to qualify a declaration.

  ‘The weather is holding up well,’ I said, getting to my feet.

  ‘The outlook, they tell me, is uncertain.’

  I left him to admire his lettering and walked back along the semicircle which I had already trodden. I wondered if I should tell Father Johnnie about McDowd’s obsession with prepubertal sex on the Termon Stone, and then I wondered if Father Johnnie would thank me for telling him. Perhaps not. He doesn’t take Matthew 18:9 with the customary pinch of salt. He is a man who has cut large chunks of his life out of his thoughts.

  By the time I had reached the Crag of Cats again, I had more or less forgotten about McDowd. I sat on the Crag looking down at Helga sawing a dead branch off a tree in her back garden. She came here, she says, to practise her art. Art or jumped-up craft? And is that all? Only a refugee would seek out this wind-scoured outpost. Is she fleeing from justice or injustice? Or resting after a surfeit of carnality? The answers to these questions don’t matter to me, but they should to Father Johnnie. No one knows her. He’s mistaken if he thinks that he does.

  Of course he is protected from life by the closed system within which he operates. What he knows as ‘the life of the spirit’ is a life of imprisonment within fifteen centuries of systematisation. It makes for smugness and self-satisfaction; the belief that there are no new questions and no new answers. If I were my brother’s keeper, I should make a breach in the mile-high wall that surrounds the garden of his soul, so that he might experience, just for a moment, the sting of the world’s winds.

  Already I can hear his dismissive laugh, a laugh of self-complacency. I once reminded him that ancient Christian custom permitted a hermit to live in spiritual marriage with a holy woman. He gave me a look of blank condescension, impervious to the needle-point of irony. Does he see our Helga as his virgo subintroducta? And if so, how long can he remain virgo intacta?

  Father Jerry went over the entry again. He studied the hand in which it was written, heavy and blunt with a hint of impatience in the joining strokes. The black ink and tight spacing gave the pages a cramped, inelegant look that reminded him of the anonymous letter, yet he could not be sure. Though Hugo was wayward and unpredictable, he was not an enemy.

  A knock at the front door brought him out on to the landing. He paused at the head of the stairs, as the heavy door opened below.

  ‘Father Jerry,’ she called.

  He held his breath.

  ‘Father Jerry, are you there?’

  He listened to her footsteps on the hallway tiles, unsure of himself and of his reason for wishing to be alone. Then the front door closed and she was gone. He went to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the fluttering in his chest to subside. A cyclist passed on his way home from the village. A woman in a checked apron shooed two hens from a potato patch. A black dog skulked between the tents on the Glebe. The sea below his window lay calm and blue. The cyclist, the woman and the dog were no longer there. Only the sea remained, dreamy and somnolent, as if it were a painting by an artist who could convey just one mood at a time. The whole world seemed to have become a still life. What lay before his eyes mocked him by changing from ‘real’ to ‘not real’ and back again.

  He lay on his back with his eyes closed. The Game … the Termon Stone … Mary Rose. It seemed inconceivable that McDaid and Hugo should keep such faded memories so urgently alive. What neither of them realised was that he himself had known Mary Rose in London.

  He had come fresh to the city from university to find her already established within a circle of genial friends. He met her by accident and fell in love with her all over again. They began going out together. Life flowed round him unseen. He knew no one and cared for nothing except her. During the day he worked in a library, living among book stacks and books, or rather among authors’ names and book titles, while she enjoyed the enveloping life of the hospital and the sorority of nurses, which gave her a sense of belonging in which he could not share.

  They met whenever she was free, sometimes in the evening and sometimes at weekends, filling the Sunday afternoons with visits to public parks, historic buildings, art galleries and museums. He had little money; he spent hours planning their expeditions and working out the cost of travel to the last penny.

  ‘You’re a born rubberneck,’ she said. ‘You can’t see a listed building without wanting to know what’s inside it. Why don’t we spend an afternoon doing nothing for a change?’

  The thought filled him with alarm. He wanted to release her from the world of doctors, patients and nurses but he had no equivalent world to offer her. He knew that the stone and mortar of the buildings they visited were a cold substitute for the human warmth of the hospital wards, and already she was envisaging a kind of life that he did not want and could not hope to provide.

  ‘I don’t hanker after an Adam fireplace or an ogee arch,’ she said. ‘What I’d like is a suburban semi with lattice windows, central heating, a television lounge and wall-to-wall carpets. I’m sick of cold and gloomy bedsitters. I don’t know how you can bear to live in yours.’

  Occasionally he would spend a night at her flat but she’d never agree to stay the night in his ‘horsebox of a room’. He grew uneasy. He was afraid that he might lose her, yet he knew that in trying to hold on to her he was in danger of losing what he saw as his own distinctive centre. She was wilful and demanding, greedy for every experience. She seemed at once younger and older than himself. They had arguments that left them raw and smarting. The physical pleasure that followed their reconciliations only reinforced the sense of personal defeat that had drained them both of sweetness and spontaneity.

  At last she suggested that they stop meeting for a month, ‘just to see how we’ll feel at the end of it’. When he rang again, she told him that she had fallen in love with a building contractor who had been ‘admitted to casualty after a car accident’.

  ‘So you’ve found your suburban semi?’ he joked.

  ‘It’s more than a semi,’ she said seriously. ‘It’s as big as a Palladian villa.’

  After a year of what he could only describe as mourning, he entered a seminary and found a frozen peace for which he was grateful. Now Hugo’s obsession with Olga was only a coarser version of his own unachievable love. Both Hugo and McDaid still romanticised Mary Rose. How could they know that the vivacious schoolgirl for whom no jape was too daring had grown into a practical, tough-minded woman who knew what she wanted and did not look back once she’d seen it?

  Hugo did not return that evening, and Father Jerry lay awake listening for his footsteps. His mind was a ground-sea of perpetual motion made ugly by the play of winter light. He thought about Mary Rose, the Termon Stone and the Game, and he said to himself as he fell asleep, ‘Lucky the man who can foretell the effects of things.’

  He had hardly finished the sentence when he found himself driving into the mountains in thickening dusk. He was covering ground, trying to keep up with Hugo who was perched high in the Land Rover thirty yards in front. They came to a fork in the road. Hugo turned left and Father Jerry took the other route because he wanted to get to Glenshask before his brother. They were both on the same mission, and now, as night set in, he could not recall what the mission might be. He drove with demonic concentration, as if nothing mattered but to greet his brother on his arrival. Then he saw a chain of lights emerging from the side of the mountain on his right. He stopped the car. The lights kept pouring out to make a gleaming necklace that circled the foot of the mountain. He realised that what he was seeing was a diabolical mirage, an endless train coming out of a tunnel to beguile his eye so that Hugo would reach Glenshask before him. He moved off again, the headlights now slicing through the slanting rain. He was approaching the place where the roads rejoined. As the Land Rover shot out in front of him, he slammed on the brakes. His car skidded. The Land Rover overturned and burst into flames. He jumped out to pull Hugo to safety and froze as he saw his own face behind the closed window. The heat was overpowering. From a safe distance he watched his own death agony until Hugo came up from behind and led him away. When the flames had died down, they went back to the Land Rover and Hugo wrenched open the door with a crowbar. A pile of charred bones fell out at his feet. He stooped and in trying to collect them burned his hand.

  ‘Can these bones relive?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no, no.’ Hugo pulled him roughly away. ‘We must hurry, we’re late already. Best to leave them for McDaid to chew over when they cool.’

  In the morning he found that Hugo’s bed had not been slept in. Though he did not believe in dreams, he decided to skip breakfast and see if McDaid was at home. He found him in Olga’s garden, sharpening a scythe. Though it was a weekday, he looked scrubbed and clean-shaven, the beaten bronze of his face forming a mask in which only the darting eyes spoke of life and movement.

  ‘When are we getting the new bell, Father?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re not getting a new bell, I said. We’ll have the old one repaired.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the fullness of time.’

  ‘It’s on everyone’s mind. I’m the sexton and naturally I get asked questions.’

  ‘Then refer your questioners to me.’

  ‘I liked ringing the bell. God spoke through the bell. Now He’s silent.’

  ‘If you wish to talk to Him, come to church more often.’

  ‘When I want to talk to God, I go out to Glencrow. There you can have a quiet conversation with no one except the water fowl to butt in. You should go out there on retreat, Father. It’s a very spiritual place.’

  ‘I never go further north than Glenshask.’

  ‘You can see Scariff Island from Glenshask. Now that’s a lonely spot if you were marooned on it. Nothing to hear except the shingle rattling and nothing to see but the Devil’s Pintle raising its head above the land.’

  Father Jerry met his glance. The self-confident mockery in McDaid’s blue eyes gave away no hint of his meaning.

  ‘The Devil doesn’t have a pintle of his own,’ Father Jerry said. ‘He doesn’t need one. He has negotiated a lien on the pintle of every living man.’

  McDaid slowly opened his mouth as if to laugh. His lower jaw swam sideways and his lower lip went slack. Father Jerry looked stern and McDaid’s eyes danced a quick jig of disbelief.

  When he got back to the house, he found Hugo in the kitchen tucking into one of his gargantuan breakfasts, the piled plate crowned with a double loin chop that in outline resembled a frizzled crab.

  ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  ‘Keeping vigil in the open. I miss the jungle here. I find a hissing cistern a bit suburban when I wake up in the middle of the night.’

  ‘You could have told me you would be spending the night elsewhere. I was convinced that you’d had an accident, or worse.’

  ‘I’m not accident-prone, though I may be the cause of accident-proneness in other men.’

  ‘Where did you spend the night?’

  ‘On Scariff Island. I motored down just before sunset. I’d have been back earlier if the outboard hadn’t given trouble.’

 

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