The Collar (10 page)

‘Begor, Bill, I wouldn't say but you're right,' the doctor said approvingly. ‘I'd almost say you were a shade better.'

‘But that's what I'm saying, man!' cried Bill, beginning to do physical exercises for him. ‘Look at that, Bobby! I couldn't do that before. I call it a blooming miracle.'

‘When you've seen as much as I have, you won't have so much belief in miracles,' said the doctor. ‘Take a couple of these tablets anyway, and I'll have another look at you in the morning.'

It was almost too easy. The most up-to-date treatments were wasted on Bobby's patients. What they all secretly desired was to be rubbed with three pebbles from a Holy Well. Sometimes it left him depressed.

‘Well, on the whole, Dr Healy,' Father Finnegan said as they drove off, ‘that was a very satisfactory evening.'

‘It was,' Bobby said guardedly. He had no intention of telling his friend how satisfactory it was from his point of view.

‘People do make extraordinary rallies after the Sacraments,' went on Father Finnegan, and Bobby saw it wasn't even necessary to tell him. Educated men can understand one another without embarrassing admissions. His own conscience was quite easy. A little religion wouldn't do Bill the least bit of harm. The Jesuit's conscience, he felt, wasn't troubling him either. Even without a miracle Bill's conversion would have opened up the Canon's parish to the order. With a miracle, they'd have every old woman, male and female, for miles around calling them in.

‘They do,' Bobby said wonderingly. ‘I often noticed it.'

‘And I'm afraid, Dr Healy, that the Canon won't like it,' added the Jesuit.

‘He won't,' said the doctor as though the idea had only just occurred to himself. ‘I'm afraid he won't like it at all.'

He was an honest man who gave credit where credit was due, and he knew it wasn't only the money – a couple of hundred a year at the least – that would upset the Canon. It was the thought that under his own very nose a miracle had been worked on one of his own parishioners by one of the hated Jesuits. Clerics are almost as cruel as small boys. The Canon wouldn't be allowed to forget the Jesuit miracle the longest day he lived.

But for the future he'd let Bobby alone.

A
CHILLES'
H
EEL

I
N ONE THING ONLY
is the Catholic Church more vulnerable than any human institution, and that is in the type of woman who preys on celibates – particularly the priest's housekeeper. The priest's housekeeper is one of the supreme examples of Natural Selection, because it has been practically proved that when for any reason she is transferred to a male who is not celibate she pines away and dies. To say that she is sexless is to say both too much and too little, for, like the Church itself, she accepts chastity for a higher end – in her case, the subjection of some unfortunate man to a degree unparalleled in marriage. Wives, of course, have a similar ambition, but their purposes are mysteriously deflected by lovemaking, jealousy of other women, and children, and it is well known that many Irish wives go into hysterics of rage at the thought of the power vested in priests' housekeepers.
Their
victims, being celibate, have no children, and are automatically sealed off from other women, who might encourage them to greater independence.

But the most powerful among these are the housekeepers of bishops. Nellie Conneely, the Bishop of Moyle's housekeeper, had been with him since he was a canon, and even in those days he had been referred to by his parishioners as ‘Nellie and the Canon'. ‘Nellie and the Canon' didn't approve of all-night dances, so all-night dances were stopped. Half the population depended for patronage on ‘Nellie and the Canon', and presents were encouraged – food for the Canon and something a little perishable for Nellie. The townspeople had no doubt as to which was the more important partner. She had even appeared on the altar steps on one occasion and announced that there would be no eight o'clock Mass because she was keeping the Canon in bed. She was a comparatively young woman for such a responsible position, and even at the time I speak of she was a well-preserved little body, with a fussy, humble, sugary air that concealed a cold intelligence. Her great rival was Canon Lanigan, who was the favourite in the succession of the diocese. In private he sniggered over her and called her La Maintenon, but when he visited the Bishop he was as sugary as herself and paid her flowery compliments on her cooking and even on her detestable bottled coffee. But Nellie, though she giggled and gushed in response, wasn't in the least taken in; she knew Lanigan preferred old French mishmash to her own candid cooking, and she warned the Bishop not to trust him. ‘God forgive me,' she said sadly, ‘I don't know how it is I can't warm to Canon Lanigan. There is something about him that is not quite sincere. I know, of course, that I'm only a foolish old woman, and you don't have to mind me.'

But the Bishop had to mind her and he did. The poor man had one great fear, which was that he was fading away for lack of proper nourishment. He knew what the old-fashioned clerics were like, with their classical scholarship and their enormous appetites, and, comparing his own accomplishments and theirs, he couldn't see for the life of him how he was ever going to reach ninety. After eating a whole chicken for his dinner, he would sit in his study for hours, wondering what the connection was between serious scholarship and proper meals, till Nellie thrust her head in the door.

‘You're all right?' she would ask coyly.

‘I'm not, Nellie,' he would reply with a worried air. ‘I'm feeling a bit low tonight.'

‘'Tis that chicken!' she would cry, making a dramatic entrance. ‘I knew it. I said it to Tim Murphy. There wasn't a pick on it.'

‘I was wondering about that myself,' he would say, fixing her with his anxious blue eyes. ‘Murphy's chickens don't seem to be the same at all.'

‘What you want is a nice grilled chop,' she would say authoritatively.

‘I don't know,' he would mutter, measuring his idea of a chop against his idea of night starvation. ‘There's a lot of eating in a chop.'

‘Well, you could have cutlets,' she would say with a shrug, implying that she didn't think much of cutlets for a bad case like his own.

‘Cutlets make a nice snack,' he agreed.

‘Ah, they do, but they're too dry,' she would cry, waving them away in disgust. ‘What you want is a good plate of nice curly rashers, with lots of fat on them. 'Twas my own fault. I knew there was nothing in that chicken. I should have served them with the chicken, but I declare to you my wits are wandering. I'm getting too old … And a couple of chips. Sure, 'twill be the making of you.'

One day, Nellie came in terrible trouble to the Bishop. She had just been visited by one of the local customs officers, Tim Leary. The Bishop's diocese was on the border between Northern and Southern Ireland, and since there was never a time when something that was plentiful on one side wasn't scarce on the other, there was constant smuggling in both directions. The South sent butter, eggs, ham and whiskey to the North, and the North sent back petrol, tea and sugar – all without benefit of duty. The customs officials of the two countries worked together in their efforts to prevent it. Nellie seemed to have the greatest difficulty in explaining to the Bishop what Tim Leary wanted of her. You'd have thought she was not bright in the head.

‘You said it yourself,' she said ingenuously. ‘This diocese was ever notorious for backbiting, but why do they pick on me? I suppose they want to have their own housekeeper, someone that would do their whispering for them. It is something I never would do, not even for your sake, and I will not do it for them, even if they do say you're too old.'

‘Who says I'm too old?' the Bishop asked mildly, but his blue eyes had an angry light in them. He knew the people who would say such things, and there were plenty of them.

‘Don't, don't ask me to carry stories!' she begged, almost in frenzy. ‘I won't do it, even to save my life. Let Canon Lanigan and the rest of them say what they like about me.'

‘Never mind Canon Lanigan,' the Bishop said shortly. ‘What did Leary say about you?'

‘But what could he say about me? What have he against me only old
doorsha-dawrsha
he picked up in the low public houses of the town? Oh, 'tisn't that at all, me lord, but the questions he asked me. They put the heart across me. “Who was the chief smuggler?” – wasn't that a nice thing for him to ask me?'

‘He thought you knew the chief smuggler?' the Bishop asked incredulously.

‘He thought I
was
the chief smuggler,' she replied with her hand to her heart. ‘He didn't say it, but I could read it in that mean little mind of his. Whiskey, petrol, tea, and things, my lord, that I declare to you and to my Maker, if I was to go before Him at this minute of time, I never even knew the names of.'

‘He must be mad,' the Bishop said with a worried air. ‘Which Learys is he belonged to? The ones from Clooneavullen?' The Bishop had a notion that most of the mysteries of human conduct could be solved by reference to heredity. He said he had never yet met a good man who came from a bad family.

‘Aha!' Nellie cried triumphantly. ‘Didn't I say it myself? That his own father couldn't read or write, and the joke of the countryside for his foolish talk!'

‘Never mind his father,' the Bishop said sternly. ‘He had an uncle in the lunatic asylum. All that family were touched. Tell him to come up here to me tomorrow, and I'll give him a bit of my mind.'

‘You will to be sure, my lord,' she said complacently as she rose. Then at the door she stopped. ‘But why would you talk to a little whippersnapper like that – a man like you, that has the ear of the government? I suppose someone put him up to it.'

The Bishop meditated on that for a moment. He saw Nellie's point about the impropriety of people's going over his head, and recognised that it might be the work of an enemy. Like Nellie, he knew the secrets of power and understood that the most important is never to deal directly with people you look down on.

‘Give me my pen!' he said at last in a voice that made Nellie's heart flutter again. When some parish priest had been seen drunk in a public place, the Bishop would say in the same dry voice to his secretary, ‘Give me my pen till I suspend Father Tom', or when some gang of wild young curates had started a card club in some remote village, ‘Give me my pen till I scatter them!' It was the voice of ultimate authority, of the Church Militant personified in her own dear, simple man.

In spite of strenuous detective work, Nellie never did get to see the Bishop's letter to his friend in the government, Seumas Butcher, the Irish Minister of Revenue, but, on the other hand, neither did the Bishop ever get to see the Minister's reply. It was one of the features of Nellie's concern for him that she did not like him to know of anything that would upset his health, and she merely removed such letters from the hall. But even she had never seen a letter so likely to upset the Bishop as that from the Minister:

Dear Dr Gallogly:

It was a real pleasure to hear from you again. Mrs Butcher was only saying a week ago that it was ages since you paid us a visit. I have had careful inquiries made about the matter you mention, and I am very sorry indeed to inform you that the statements of the local Revenue Officer appear to be fully substantiated. Your housekeeper, Miss Ellen Conneely, is the owner of licensed premises at the other side of the Border which have long been known as the headquarters of a considerable smuggling organisation, whose base on this side appears to be the Episcopal Palace. You will realise that the Revenue Officers have no desire to take any steps that could be an embarrassment to you, but you will also appreciate that this traffic involves a considerable loss of revenue for both our country and the North of Ireland, and might, in the event of other gangs operating in the neighbourhood being tried and convicted, result in serious charges. I should be deeply grateful for Your Lordship's kind assistance in putting an early end to it.

Mise le meas

Seumas O. Buitseir

Aire

Nellie fully understood, when she had read this, the tone with which the Bishop said ‘Give me my pen', as a father might say ‘Give me my stick.' There were certain matters that could only be dealt with by a pen like a razor, and that evening she sat in her own room and wrote:

Dear Sir:

His Lordship, the Most Reverend Dr Gallogly, Bishop of Moyle, has handed me your letter of the 3rd inst. and asked me to reply to it on his behalf. He says it is a tissue of lies and that he does not want to be bothered any more with it. I suppose His Lordship would not know what is going on in his own house? Or is it a rogue and robber you think he is? I do not know how you can have the face to say such things to a bishop. All those lies were started by Tim Leary, and as His Lordship says, what better could you expect of a man whose uncle died in the Moyle Asylum, a wet and dirty case? The public house you talk about is only another of the lies. It does not belong to me at all but to my poor brother who, after long years of suffering for Ireland in English prisons, is now an incurable invalid with varicose veins and six children. How would the likes of him be a smuggler? Tim Leary will be thrown out if he calls here again. It is all lies. Did Tim Leary suffer for Ireland? Has Tim Leary six children? What has happened our Christian principles and what do we pay taxes for? We were better off when we had the English.

Yours sincerely,

Ellen Conneely

There was something about this letter that gave Nellie a real thrill of pride and satisfaction. Like all women of her kind, she had always had the secret desire to speak out boldly with the whole authority of the Church behind her, and now she had done it.