The devils diary, p.13
The Devil's Diary, page 13
‘What made you do such a thing?’
‘I wanted to find out how it was. There are some things a man really needs to know. I felt the same about sex once. Now I can put it from my mind — the island, I mean. I’m still finding out about the other.’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘I didn’t go there to sleep, I went to listen. It wasn’t in the least like the jungle. I heard no sound I didn’t recognise.’
‘You’re satisfied, then?’
‘Not entirely. I can’t figure out why Brennan should want to leave it in such a hurry. I could spend my life there alone, if someone drop-shipped a hamper once a week.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that you may have a screw loose?’
‘It has occurred to me that my vision is better than yours. I see what there is to see. It’s a pity that I myself am not perceived so accurately.’
Chapter 12
The bishop arrived shortly after midday, looking taller, more military and more self-possessed than last time. Sipping his brandy and smoking a panatella, he deployed his well-known gift for oblique but insistent questioning. It was the kind of gift that a man given to self-questioning and self-denial would use sparingly.
‘As I drove through the village, the Protestant church clock struck twelve. Our bell was silent. It pleased me to see the people in the street pause to say the Angelus, and I couldn’t help smiling at the way we rely on the Opposition to remind us to pray.’
‘I’m trying to get the old bell brazed. Understandably, the bell-founders would prefer to sell me a new one.’
‘Why not buy a new bell and trade in the old one for smelting?’ the bishop suggested softly.
‘In a sense there is merit in having no bell. A bell is a symbol of health. “Sound as a bell” is a well-known phrase. Here in this glen we are no longer sound. We’re recovering from the effects of twenty years of vandalism. The bell, I’m convinced, cracked for a reason that had nothing to do with metal fatigue.’
‘We mustn’t impute to God such crudely mechanical intervention. Bells do crack from time to time, and bells that crack must be replaced.’
Father Jerry took him up to his bedroom to show him the view from the north window. He pointed out the fishmeal factory with its cloud of shrieking seagulls, and then the hippies’ tents on the Glebe below.
‘When you look down over the Glebe, what do you see, Bishop?’
‘A circle of tents. Rather picturesque, I must say.’
‘You don’t notice the smouldering fires?’
‘Yes, now that you’ve mentioned them.’
‘I see the refuse pit that smoked day and night outside Jerusalem.’
‘Gehenna? Surely that’s a bit far-fetched.’ The bishop laughed.
‘Here Gehenna is a living presence. I breathe its smoke and smell its stinking refuse on the way to Mass every morning. At night I dream about it, and when I wake, it lies open before my bedroom window.’
Ge-Hinnom … Gehenna,’ the bishop murmured. ‘You’re out of step with the times, my dear Jerry. Hell has become an embarrassment that requires a great deal of theological ingenuity to explain away. But look at those seagulls. They’re rather beautiful, in spite of all you say.’
‘When I was a boy, I used to think of them following the plough or looking whiter than white among grazing sheep in a field. My father and I used to watch them on mountain loughs, coming and going and crying as they rose. He used to say that they were more romantic than Shelley’s skylark and Keats’s nightingale. Here they’ve become gluttonous scavengers grown fat on pollution. And like the hippies, they don’t care where they defecate.’
The bishop gazed down on the sleeping sea below them, a flat expanse of blue with zigzag paths of viridescence and curling selvages of white that formed a living, wandering picture of perfection and peace on earth.
‘I love this glen,’ he said. ‘As you approach it over the moor, you feel that you are about to shed all worldly impedimenta, that you will come back a leaner and truer man. It is a place where you don’t have to be a saint to keep yourself unspotted from the world.’
‘The World is already here, I’m telling you. And with the World has come the circus of the Flesh and the Ringmaster himself who shall be nameless in your presence.’
The bishop blew a smoke ring. It floated delicately upwards, an expanding halo that yet remained too small for his head.
‘I thought the Ringmaster had absconded,’ he smiled. ‘You were luckier than most. Not everyone who jousts with the Ringmaster can claim victory.’
He wondered if the bishop were making fun of him. His face was expressionless, his grey eyes fixed on the squiggles of green that melted into the blue of the palimpsest in front of them.
‘Are you happy in your ministry, Jerry?’ He spoke directly to the sea while he puffed.
‘I have found more peace here than in London. There is more time for meditation –’
‘You’ve recovered from your illness?’
‘I’ve never felt better.’
‘You’re making a name for yourself as a confessor. Canon Hackler tells me that certain devout women from his end of the parish come to you rather than him for confession. He said you were the new Curé d’Ars.’
‘The canon likes to jest about these things.’
‘The Curé d’Ars was just the man for nineteenth-century France. Today we value above all the socially active priest with a socially active conscience. The canon is such a man, but he is only human. In his heart of hearts he would like to be a gifted confessor too.’
‘We’re men of different methods, the canon and I, but we work well together, I like to think.’
‘The canon is a practical man who never gets bogged down in detail. We need such men to bridge the gap between the Church and the World. We must never forget that double-entry book-keeping was invented by a monk.’
The bishop gave a little laugh that was at once affable and admonitory. Neither the fishmeal factory nor the hippie camp could shake him in his determination to be himself. He wheeled with military correctitude and led the way down the stairs. In the hallway he brushed a flake of ash from the front of his soutane and, with a smoothness that was almost surreptitious, drew a little red skullcap from his pocket.
‘It looks like rain. You should have brought your cappa magna,’ Father Jerry smiled.
‘I’m a modern bishop, I don’t possess one. I’ve got a mac in the back of the car.’
‘A black one, I hope?’
The bishop adjusted his skullcap and pretended not to have heard.
‘The spiritual life reminds me of swimming in the sea,’ he confided. ‘In swimming hydrodynamics is all. A good swimmer makes the destructive element work for him. He propels himself with the minimum of energy. He knows when to glide, when to rest, and when to breathe. In a true sense the water is his ally. The spiritual life has its dynamics too. The World is the water in which we must sink or swim. I’d like you to think about that, Jerry. We must all strive to see with an eye that isn’t ours.’
As he took the bishop’s proffered hand, Father Jerry said that Canon Hackler was the best swimmer he knew.
That evening Hugo told him that he would be going to Dublin at the weekend to collect his missing trunk.
‘It’s the one that contains my diaries,’ he enthused. ‘It turned up miraculously in Tilbury, thanks to your prayers, I’m sure. I’ll be a different man once I’ve got my diaries back. You must read them. They’re even franker than Pepys’s. The best entries begin “And so to bed”.’
Father Jerry remembered that Olga had not called on him for over a week. He decided to drop in on her, in the hope that talking to her might calm his almost Manichaean fear of the world and worldly bishops. She was in the back yard killing a young chicken in a manner that he could describe only as unusual. The chicken was stretched on the ground with a broomstick across its neck. She was standing on the broomstick gazing down at the open beak and the weakly fluttering wings. She looked aggressive and formidable, her long legs far apart.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You weren’t meant to see this.’
‘I’ll come back when you’re less busy.’
‘No, please go inside. I shan’t be long.’
He waited in the kitchen which was somewhat bare. She came in for a knife and went out again. Then she returned without the knife and told him that her method of killing pullets might be unconventional but that she found it less obnoxious than twisting their necks. She led him into a little workshop next to the kitchen where a carving of two dolphins stood on a table.
‘I found a lovely piece of elm quite by accident. When I looked at it, I saw two leaping dolphins waiting for a hand to release them.’
‘What lovely grain.’ He stood beside her caressing their backs.
‘The wood dictated everything. They came as a gift from nowhere.’
‘They’re twins, and at the same time they’re not identical.’
‘One is called Hugo. I haven’t yet found a name for the other.’
She gave a little laugh which he took to be critical and left him to examine her chisels while she made tea. With the tea she gave him a slice of home-made cake and sat by the open window in the low sunlight of evening.
‘I’m going up to Dublin at the weekend to sell some of my pieces. This cottage doesn’t pay for itself, which is a pity. I need a rich patron who would love me for my carvings, not myself.’
She smiled and leant forward with the sun on her neck. For a moment she looked very young and vulnerable. Then she sat upright again, confident and self-reliant. Golden sunlight enriched the sheen of her fine, straight hair.
‘You’re taking the coach, I suppose?’
‘I’m getting a lift with Hugo. If things go well, I’ll buy a second-hand car before the winter. Then I’ll be really independent. That’s my aim.’
He was annoyed that Hugo hadn’t told him, and he felt less than happy with himself for being annoyed.
‘I dislike having to go to Dublin, it’s so squalid and joyless; it has even more bureaucrats than Bonn. And making sure that I don’t bump into my husband gives me that feeling of being on the run. It’s lovely coming back, though. This glen’s a haven, it’s so far away from what people call the world.’
‘As Prospero said to Miranda, “’Tis new to thee.”’
She leant back and closed her eyes. A piece of thistledown floated in through the window and played before her immobile face. He watched its rise and fall, and then its gentle drift down inside her blouse. She opened her eyes and looked at him in surprise.
‘I was on the verge of sleep,’ she said, getting up. ‘It’s this heavy sea air. As you say, it’s new to me.’
He rose abruptly and thanked her for the tea. On the way home he breathed deeply and evenly, filling his lungs with air that was clean and strong. She had left him with a sense of not knowing and not being able to know. The life she led was simple. She spent most of the day carving and for exercise went for long walks on the hill. He saw her in the distance every day, and in another sense he saw her every day for the first time. She had stirred the communal imagination, as Hugo put it. She was not an ordinary woman; her mind did not run on ordinary things.
‘Olga is fleeing from the world,’ he said. ‘Yet for me she is the world. Like most people who wish to escape from the world, she is merely seeking to escape from herself.’
He said nothing about Olga to Hugo. Instead he kept an eye on Hugo’s diary. With growing excitement he went into his brother’s room every morning only to find the words ‘No thought, no action’ written against the date of the previous day. What Father Jerry sought was something akin to objectivity, a view through a narrow, deep-set window that would bestow on him a sense of wholeness and completion and the will to act.
On Friday morning Hugo had an early breakfast. As Father Jerry returned from Mass, the Land Rover was parked by the gate with Olga’s carvings in boxes in the back. She and Hugo came out of the parochial house and down the avenue together. She was wearing a black blouse; a long, tight-fitting skirt with blue and black vertical stripes; white stockings and black shoes. It occurred to him that he had never seen any woman dressed so strikingly before.
‘We’re off,’ Hugo said. ‘And don’t worry, we won’t do anything you wouldn’t do yourself.’
‘What shall we bring you back?’ Olga asked.
‘A case of vintage altar wine?’ Hugo suggested. He was smiling broadly out of a dark beard that could have done with trimming.
‘No, thank you. I’ve got everything I need here – in fact more than I strictly need.’
He watched her climb into the Land Rover and visualised her in the back yard with a gasping pullet between her feet. Today she looked so elegant that she was not just remote but absent. Yet it was not a conventional elegance; it was a public declaration, a criticism of the very idea of elegance as something to be put on and taken off. He went straight to Hugo’s bedroom and, with an interest that in a layman might have verged on the prurient, read the entry for the previous day:
August 19th
In my pursuit of Helga I neglect my diary and McDowd. Two weeks ago she’d barely talk to me. Things have changed; she’s accepted my offer of a lift to Dublin, as if she’d clean forgotten those sheep’s skulls and the time I goosed her too violently in the pub. Why this sudden volte-face? Has McDowd fouled her bed? Has the Holy Man said a prayer for me? Or does she find my Land Rover irresistible? It doesn’t matter. She’s taken up permanent residence inside my head. She’s a physical woman with a muscular way of thinking. As you talk to her, you can feel your mind expand. She’s aware of the danger of being loved for the wrong reasons. She deliberately wears those loose-fitting flour bags to enable you to concentrate more fully on what she’s saying. Or perhaps she wants to go easy on Father Johnnie. It must be hell for him, being so close to her and not being able to think what’s on his mind.
Pity about the carving. She talks of nothing else and, worse, she thinks about nothing else. Yesterday she called me in to see her latest masterpiece, a pair of sleek dolphins in a spin.
‘They’re called Johnnie and Hugo,’ she said, ‘but don’t tell Father Johnnie.’
‘I can’t vouch for His Reverence but I’m flattered. Dolphins are intelligent. I hope you don’t do them an injustice.’
‘Which is Father Johnnie and which is you?’ she teased.
‘Father Johnnie is the one leaping up with his nose in the air. I’m the one going down, about to re-enter the water. Am I right?’
‘You only see yourself in contrast to your brother.’
‘We are dissimilar. I’m heavy, he’s light. I’ve got a broad face and a bushy head, broad shoulders and a thick waist. He’s got thin, aquiline features and fine, sleek hair. He’s a near-vegetarian who eats frugally and I’m what he calls “a carnalising carnivore”. He’s full of quick movements, he never sits still. I can sit in my room for half an hour without moving a muscle. He’s a reader who doesn’t think and I’m a thinker who doesn’t read.’
‘I don’t see you like that at all. To me you are similar to the point of dissimilarity, quite a different thing.’
‘Which of us do you prefer? The one going up or the one going down?’
‘You mustn’t assume that you’re the one going down.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘I like you both. There’s more of you to see and there’s more of him to understand.’
She covered the carving with her apron, and I thought of closing time and the barmaid putting a towel over the beer pumps. She’s a superior woman. I can tell that I have my work cut out. Though McDowd has the best opportunity, she may come to see him as her paid servant, not her cavaliere servente. So my real rival may be the holy celibate who would if only he could. How can I let him know that he is standing in my way without putting bad thoughts in his oh so sanctified head?
He weighed each word slowly as he read. Hugo had fictionalised Olga and McDaid; he had created an alternative reality with a solidity and coherence that he knew to be illusory. Reading the diary day after day gave him a sense of personal depth which he could only attribute to the experience of observing his own character being re-created by a stranger.
He spent the afternoon pottering in his vegetable garden because he couldn’t settle down to a book. The house was empty. All life within its walls had ceased. He was bound by a feeling of not quite knowing what to do. On Saturday morning he went through the diary again from start to finish. So much was missing, including any mention of the night Hugo had spent on the island alone. The things that moved him to write seemed as random and arbitrary as life itself. He paused at a paragraph which he had not noted before:
It has become clear to me that I must take Helga to Scariff Island. Certain things can only be experienced at first hand. I’ve told her about the hogsback and the rattling shingle which is best heard on a wild night. She showed no interest, and that I took as a criticism. If she spent a night till morning on the island with me, she would come back a changed woman. She seeks an elemental experience. I know I am the man who will provide it.
He felt a desire to see the island again for himself; to go over the ground, examining stones, bones and bladder-wrack. Though he did not know what he expected to find, he had a sense of exhilaration as he readied Hugo’s boat.
All the way down he faced a salty breeze that subdued the heat of the sun on his head. He sat at the tiller, open-collared and in shirt-sleeves, watching the polishing action of the breeze on the water, which seemed dull and heavy with a skin of warts and wrinkles. Whenever a gannet plummeted, he visualised death beneath the skin, but for the most part he was aware of little more than a sense of peace that came from being alone and unobserved under an open sky.
He beached the boat on the white shingle, above which rose two pinnacles of rock with a narrow gully in between. He picked his way up the slope to the highest point and looked back to the mainland where the north-facing cliffs stood dark and sheer. Then, wheeling quickly, he scanned an empty sea of stippled light stretching to the horizon in the south. The ground was strewn with crisp, sun-dried wrack that had been blown ashore during the winter and now crunched loudly underfoot. Though he knew that he was alone, he had a feeling that he was being observed, which obliterated the sense of peace he had enjoyed on the water. Among the wrack on the high ground were the whitened bones of sea birds but there were no bones among the beach stones below. His sense of unease could be explained only by the fact that the things he saw and the sounds he heard were those he had seen and heard before as he read through Hugo’s diary.
