among. From them, I learned what it was to live in a state of grace. I encountered no closet Nazis and no one who thought the priesthood a secure route to a secret future of child molestation. The black propaganda attached to the organised Church proved to be exactly that in my personal experience. The most sinister crime I came across was an occasional tendency on the part of some of the older instructors to sermonise at length. But there are people in all walks of life that combine a fondness for the sound of their own voices with an inability to say anything original. It’s a human, not a Catholic or a religious failing.
Of course, the Jesuits owed their bad reputation to events of four hundred years ago. The torture and burnings of the Counter-Reformation came a long time prior to ambivalence within the Vatican over Mussolini and Hitler, and the child abuse scandals covered up by dioceses in Chicago and Dublin and a depressing litany of other places. But the Jesuit with whom I came chiefly into contact was probably the holiest man I’d ever met. Monsignor Delaunay was said by some to be distantly related to the great French painter of the same name. He organised occasional retreats at a house owned by the Church in Barmouth on the Welsh coast. The house was Georgian. It was a solid, isolated three-storey building overlooking the bay. To its left, majestic in the Welsh mist clinging to the sea, rose the great edifice of Cader Idris a few miles along the peninsula.
There was rumoured to be a monster in the sea at Barmouth. What lent the story credence was that it had originated with fishermen and not tourists. It did not stop Monsignor Delaunay enjoying his daily constitutional of a mile-long swim. He did not have the gaunt, fastidious look made stereotypical in his order by its grim founder. He was a strapping man with a hammer-thrower’s arms and shoulders whose sheer bulk defied the freezing water when he swam in the winter. At night, around a driftwood fire in the library of the house, he would tell his war stories of missions to Africa and South America. I always felt there were things he did not choose to share with his raw and innocent audience. But the tales were spellbinding nevertheless. In Barmouth, within hearing range of Monsignor Delaunay, I could really believe I had a future serving a great, merciful, formidable God. Delaunay had the rare gift of making faith contagious.
What did for me in the end was that I just couldn’t endure the cold solitude of celibacy. I craved physical intimacy. Rebecca cavorted in my dreams wearing nothing but a splash of her Guerlain perfume. The last three months were terrible. I was only nineteen and already facing the second great failure to afflict my life. And this one was wholly my fault. There was no mitigation to be had. I prayed, but doing so only seemed to demonstrate the futility of prayer. I prayed, the demeanour of a martyr concealing the instinct of a rabbit in heat. In such circumstances, I could hardly turn to the traditional source in a seminary of comfort and reassurance. Confession would have been of no help at all to someone so desperate to commit sin. There was no choice but to give up, and pack up and leave.
It’s fair to say that my father took this badly. Prior to the call of my false vocation, I’d been doing pretty well on a history and politics degree course at the London School of Economics. But the course was oversubscribed and they couldn’t see any way two years on to take me back. Despite my qualifications and past academic record, if a place did become available, there were more deserving cases than mine, apparently, on an existing waiting list. I ended up on a straight history course at the University of Kent at Canterbury. My father was gracious enough to pay my tuition fees and to help make up my grant shortfall which, in fairness to him, constituted practically the entire grant. But he did not really speak to me for about three years, and he chose not to attend my degree congregation. I couldn’t much blame him. I’d cost him his chance of an easy passage into Heaven. Even to a man as wealthy as my dad, that was quite a loss to endure.
Rebecca, of course, had long moved on by the time of what everyone still talking to me termed my release. She was dating a property developer from Fulham. I saw them together in a bar in Pimlico about eight months after leaving the seminary. I’d had a bit to drink. I might have picked a fight with him, had he been bigger and taller than he was and therefore an opponent I could goad into a scrap without being labelled afterwards a bully. But hitting him, even drunk, I knew was only marginally less infantile than letting down the tyres of his Porsche. I was hugely to blame for what had happened with Rebecca. She was only slightly to blame. The property developer was not to blame at all. But passing what I assumed was his Porsche, on the way home from that bar, I have to say I was sorely tempted.
Between discarding Rebecca and meeting Suzanne, I did have relationships with women. But they were casual and sometimes callous and always fleeting. Romance and spontaneity are, I think, the biggest casualties of the age of the text and the email. Everything now seems so contingent and circumscribed. There’s no place for sincerity when you can so easily avoid the honest call of a human voice. Thank God for the Shadwell Pussies, I used to think. They delivered Suzanne, saved me from solitude and brought me love. That’s what I used to think, before I sat her down after her return from Dublin and told her everything that had occurred since my father’s purchase of the wreck of the
Her flight from Dublin had been delayed and she got back tired and a bit fraught anyway. She was not making the progress with the Michael Collins research that she had been expected to. Someone superior to her in the programme-making hierarchy had fallen into the trap of reaching conclusions about some aspects of Collins’ life and character before the research had vindicated them. It was the classic pitfall in their particular line of work. Everybody did it, but that didn’t make it any more acceptable a tendency. It was unreasonable and unfair. It had put extra pressure on Suzanne. She got back to London frustrated and angry.
She stood over by our open sitting-room window and smoked a cigarette while she considered what I had told her. She had been a heavy smoker from a family of smokers when I’d met her. She’d cut down considerably since then. But she still smoked Marlboro Reds. And the smoke drifted from her nostrils in two satisfied plumes when she smoked. She stood there in the chill of the window with her cigarette poised elegantly in her hand beside her pale jaw, thinking. Her black hair was cut into a glossy and precise bob. Her eyes, a brown so burnished they were almost black, glittered in the light from the street below. She was dressed in a black pencil skirt and a white shirt and her hair at its edge was geometrically neat above the white, open collar of the shirt. Not for the first time, I thought she looked like a woman from another time, from an era when the circumstances in which the two of us lived would have been nothing other than scandalous. She wouldn’t have cared. That was something else again about her.
Smoke wreathed around her lovely head. You could easily imagine Michael Collins making a play for her at some dinner held to fete him during the London peace negotiations that indirectly caused his death. You could imagine Harry Spalding doing the same at some plush and exclusive tennis or yachting club. He would click across the parquet in his leather heels approaching her. His tread would be light but determined. She would catch the eye of any man. There was a challenge in her, though, that the predators among them might find irresistible.
Eventually, she ground out her cigarette stub in a foil ashtray on the sill and flicked it out of the window. ‘I’d heard something about the curse of the
‘Why did you do that?’
She turned to me. ‘I did it because of your father’s proposition. Because although you sounded proud and flattered, you also sounded afraid.’
‘Something spooked me,’ I said. ‘Looking at Spalding’s face in the group picture of the Jericho Crew, I felt something so strong it was almost a premonition. Walking home afterwards in the fog across Lambeth Bridge, I felt as though I was being followed.’
She nodded. And she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. The London night was very quiet outside our open window in the flat. But you could feel the drift of river damp on the air. It was now early March and the air still raw. ‘You’re a very intuitive man, Martin.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Because you didn’t see the punch coming that broke your nose? Or because you wasted a year and a half of your life on a failed vocation?’
‘Either example would stand as evidence.’
‘How do you think the fire was started that destroyed the vessel’s log? Bearing in mind that it burned with such stubborn ferocity, I mean.’
‘I don’t know, Suzanne. In my mind’s eye I see the spectre of Harry Spalding with a Very pistol in his hand. He grins his death’s head grin in the darkness in the vault as he pulls the trigger and fires a distress flare into the pile of volumes.’
‘But we’ll never know. Everything burned, so we’ll never know,’ she said. And this surprised me.
