My Oedipus Complex (55 page)

‘It would have struck the old maid all right, though.'

Fogarty turned his eyes for a moment to stare at Jackson. Jackson was staring back. Then he missed a turning and reversed with a muttered curse. To the left of them the Wicklow mountains stretched away southwards, and between the grey walls the fields were a ragged brilliant green under the tattered sky.

‘You're not serious, Jim?' he said after a few minutes.

‘Oh, I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong,' Jackson said, gesturing widely with his pipe. ‘Women get ideas. We all know that.'

‘These things can happen in very innocent ways,' Fogarty said with ingenuous solemnity. Then he scowled again and a blush spread over his handsome craggy face. Like all those who live mainly in their imaginations, he was always astonished and shocked at the suggestions that reached him from the outside world: he could live with his fantasies only by assuming that they were nothing more. Jackson, whose own imagination was curbed and even timid, who never went at things like a thoroughbred at a gate, watched him with amusement and a certain envy. Just occasionally he felt that he himself would have liked to welcome a new idea with that boyish wonder and panic.

‘I can't believe it,' Fogarty said angrily, tossing his head.

‘You don't have to,' Jackson replied, nursing his pipe and swinging round in the seat with his arm close to Fogarty's shoulder. ‘As I say, women get these queer ideas. There's usually nothing in them. At the same time, I must say
I
wouldn't be very scandalized if I found out that there was something in it. If ever a man needed someone to care for him, Devine did in the last year or two.'

‘But not Devine, Jim,' Fogarty said, raising his voice. ‘Not Devine! You could believe a thing like that about me. I suppose I could believe it about you. But I knew Devine since we were kids, and he wouldn't be capable of it.'

‘I never knew him in that way,' Jackson admitted. ‘In fact, I scarcely
knew him at all, really. But I'd have said he was as capable of it as the rest of us. He was lonelier than the rest of us.'

‘God, don't I know it?' Fogarty said in sudden self-reproach. ‘I could understand if it was drink.'

‘Oh, not drink!' Jackson said with distaste. ‘He was too fastidious. Can you imagine him in the D.T.s like some old parish priest, trying to strangle the nurses?'

‘But that's what I say, Jim. He wasn't the type.'

‘Oh, you must make distinctions,' said Jackson. ‘I could imagine him attracted by some intelligent woman. You know yourself how he'd appeal to her, the same way he appealed to us, a cultured man in a country town. I don't have to tell you the sort of life an intelligent woman leads, married to some lout of a shopkeeper or a gentleman farmer. Poor devils, it's a mercy that most of them aren't educated.'

‘He didn't give you any hint who she was?' Fogarty asked incredulously. Jackson had spoken with such conviction that it impressed him as true.

‘Oh, I don't even know if there was such a woman,' Jackson said hastily, and then he blushed too. Fogarty remained silent. He knew now that Jackson had been talking about himself, not Devine.

As the country grew wilder and furze bushes and ruined keeps took the place of pastures and old abbeys, Fogarty found his eyes attracted more and more to the wreath that swayed lightly with the hearse, the only spot of pure colour in the whole landscape with its watery greens and blues and greys. It seemed an image of the essential mystery of a priest's life. What, after all, did he really know of Devine? Only what his own temperament suggested, and mostly – when he wasn't being St Francis of Assisi – he had seen himself as the worldly one of the pair; the practical, coarse-grained man who cut corners, and Devine as the saint, racked by the fastidiousness and asceticism that exploded in his bitter little jests. Now his mind boggled at the idea of the agony that alone could have driven Devine into an entanglement with a woman; yet the measure of his incredulity was that of the conviction he would presently begin to feel. When once an unusual idea broke through his imagination, he hugged it, brooded on it, promoted it to the dignity of a revelation.

‘God, don't we lead terrible lives?' he burst out at last. ‘Here we are, probably the two people in the world who knew Devine best, and even we have no notion what that thing in front of us means.'

‘Which might be as well for our peace of mind,' said Jackson.

‘I'll engage it did damn little for Devine's,' Fogarty said grimly. It was peculiar; he did not believe yet in the reality of the woman behind the wreath, but already he hated her.

‘Oh, I don't know,' Jackson said in some surprise. ‘Isn't that what we all really want from life?'

‘Is it?' Fogarty asked in wonder. He had always thought of Jackson as a cold fish, and suddenly found himself wondering about that as well. After all, there must have been something in him that attracted Devine. He had the feeling that Jackson, who was, as he recognized, by far the subtler man, was probing him, and for the same reason. Each was looking in the other for the quality that had attracted Devine, and, which, having made him their friend might make them friends also. Each was trying to see how far he could go with the other. Fogarty, as usual, was the first with a confession.

‘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 realize 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 quire and nave. The hearse was already drawn up outside and people had gathered in a semi-circle 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 school-teacher 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 realize 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.