Be Near Me (25 page)

'Our lives are liable to catch up with us, Gerard.'

He was silent for a moment. I felt there was great intimacy in the silence, as there used to be those years ago at sopra Minerva when he heard my heartfelt and selective confession. 'This is only egotism,' he said. 'The great destroyer.'

I didn't mention the Bishop's own doubts, the walks we used to take along the Appian Way, the feeling once expressed by my proud Glaswegian friend that the Church might offer a refuge against temptation, somewhere to exist as a noble animal in the struggle against the nights, to bed down on ancient stone like the cats in the Coliseum. Gerard was silent about most things—silence being oxygen to men like us—but I knew there hadn't been six months together in his adult life when he wasn't in love and when he didn't go to sleep wanting to be loved.

'We can fix this,' he said.

'How?'

'Inside the Church. We have experience and we can solve the problem in our own way. That is our strength.'

'It is a criminal matter,' I said. 'That is how it will be fixed.'

'Don't misunderstand me,' he said, protecting himself. 'I have already asked the police if it was okay for me to speak with you. I am not interested in covering anything up.'

'Heaven forfend.'

He ignored me. His voice softened, and I recalled how vivid and consoling a pastor he used to be. 'You are not considering your parishioners. Their faith is in your hands and we cannot suffer this to happen. David, think again. Cleave to the love of the faithful. You have never loved them. You took your role seriously, but only as a role.'

'I didn't set out to possess their hearts.'

'That is a wicked statement. Is that one of your
aesthetic
defences? Because art will not defend you now.'

'Sadly not,' I said. 'But I had a beautiful garden. We managed to destroy it together, them and me. I will face it now.'

'Don't do this,' he said. 'You're not thinking straight. No matter what you say, the public will crucify you.'

'I appreciate all the efforts you have made for me, Gerard. But I am my own Judas. My own Pontius Pilate. I kissed the boy and will fight the matter in my own way.'

'It will all be politics and newspapers,' he said. 'And you're bad at politics. You know nothing about the papers up here. You don't understand what people will try to make of this.'

'I must take my chances.'

'I will cut you adrift,' he said.

'As you must.'

'You don't know where you are heading.'

'Then I quote Seneca,' I said. '"If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable."'

He coughed again into the phone. 'That is the kind of remark that will destroy you,' he said.

Someone had been thumping again and again on the front door. I stared at the sideboard as Gerard spoke—Ampleforth in watercolours, a bottle of Haut-Bailly 1999—and slowly the caring flavour departed from my old friend's voice as he turned bureaucratic.

'What happens now?' I said.

'I must place you on administrative leave,' he said. 'You will leave the rectory by midday tomorrow. We could arrange a place for you at the Dirrans Monastery.'

'That won't be necessary.'

'Look, David,' he said, 'think about what I'm saying. He that yields to reproof shows understanding. A little humility would help you now.'

'It's a little late in the day for that, is it not?'

I rang off and placed the phone back in its cradle. Thirty years of friendship liquidated just like that, in a lather of busted proprieties and self-defences. I wondered what habit had said of us; what Church conventions had revealed of Gerard, what they had hidden. It seemed to me his anger was inseparable from a threatened sense of himself, and I could not blame him for that or for anything worse.

A voice purred at the letterbox. 'We only want to get the facts right,' said the person. 'Listen. Yer gonnae have the chance to put your ane side of the story. Hello. Father Anderton. It's jeest to get the facts. It's in yer ane interests to speak to me.'

They sounded like cattle. I could hear them and smell their pleasure. Who could be sure if the photographers were there for the people or the people there for the photographers, but the noise they made was a lustful and carnival sound and it grew closer, madder, like the sound of drums approaching from the distance to deafen the sinful. I turned off the radio on my way past the upstairs loo and positioned myself in the bedroom, the edge of the curtain between my fingers.

'Come oot, ya child molestin' bastard!'

'Paedophile!'

'Beastie!'

'Come on, ya English bastard!'

Dead flies lay on the windowsill, crisp in the sun. Some of the people down there held placards daubed with hideous words, and they laughed into each other's faces, women holding onto themselves with mirth and a younger one jigging on the spot. I saw a young girl cup her hands around her mouth for increased volume. 'Scumbag!' she shouted.

A man held up a rope, and another one was smoking and digging the air with his finger as he spoke to a reporter. A photographer climbed onto a gravestone to get a better picture of the crowd. Every face was white, and I knew a number of them. The people weren't churchgoers, but they had been to weddings and funerals, and I knew them by their haircuts and their piercings. I'm sure several children were eating ice cream and taking pictures with their phones. It was that kind of day. It was that kind of atmosphere. It was Marymass, after all. And in the middle of the crowd stood the father of Mark McNulty.

He had a certain sleepy menace. A depressed look. I kept hold of the net curtain but tried not to let it move. Mark's father was the dead centre of the crowd and I could see people stroking and patting his arms. The women kissed his cheeks, soothing some terrible feeling. One of them, very plump, wore a turquoise tracksuit and had crimson hair, and she fluttered around the main man like a green-winged macaw. They gave Mark's father the role of chief mourner at a funeral, except they looked towards him for an heroic action.

I could see him taking breaths, each deeper than the last, each denser with the feeling of the crowd, until he heaved in his chest one last time and charged towards the storm doors. I'll always remember it, the look of confusion and hatred on his face and the inward rush, his sudden vanishing from my field of vision and then the thunder at the door.

'Fucken beastie!'

'Paedophile!'

The people. Watching them from the window, I noticed, for all their ferocity, how easy a communion existed between them. A sense of loyalty to one another—the idea of one another—was powerful down there in the lane among the colours and the fizzy drinks. Some of them were Protestants, and a generality of historical dislike and dark heresies must have informed their anger, but I feel most of them were decent in themselves and wanted some sort of improved life, a life in which religious leaders could be trusted and children could be safe. Even to my eyes, there was something objective about the warriors outside the door. I didn't really know them; I didn't know what it might be like to live so certain of togetherness. We each have our rights to idealism, and theirs
was theirs, thwarted again by a man in a collar who stood behind the curtains that day, protecting himself from all they could be and all their supposed decencies.

Leave a man to his fate. Let the moments of his life speak either for or against the goodness of his heart. The pillow was cool like nothing on earth. I put my head there, summer, autumn, winter and spring, and was sure as I lay down and felt a twinge of pain in my eye that all might be well and that some old friend might come to my aid. It was not my father, and not yet the distant and distancing music of Chopin. It was not Conor. He passed for a moment through my thoughts, only to tell me he could never help me. None of this world was the world we shared.

The door banged again and I heard it split. None of my teachers came into the room. No mother. No saving grace. The only person in those moments was my oldest acquaintance—myself—waiting as usual for a creak on the stairs, the feel of the cotton against my ear drawing me back to the sound of my own blood turning. I watched the bright window for another moment and then closed my eyes and drowned in a perfect solitude of prayer.

MR MCNULTY FAILED TO REACH
the landing before the police came in and dragged him out of the house. I opened my eyes to find the familiar young officer standing in polished shoes. 'Father, I think you should let us take you out of here,' he said. 'There's a mob outside and I don't think you want to hang about any longer.' He bit his lip and seemed to scan the room for superior advice. 'Have you a bag you can pack?'

'I don't want to leave all my things,' I said.

'You'll have to,' he said. 'Between you and me, there are total bampots out there. You're not safe here. Idiots, you know. Have you somewhere else to go?'

I could hear a drum. 'Has the Orange band arrived?'

'One of their drummers,' said the officer. I stood up from the bed and walked to the window. 'I really think you should leave.'

'How absurd,' I said. 'I don't believe this is happening.'

'It's happening all right,' he said. 'There's dozens of press people out there, so everything's by the book. I suggest you pack some clothes.' I asked him if I could drive away in my own car.

'I'm sorry, Father,' he said. 'They've totalled it.'

Coming down the stairs, I ran my hand over the wallpaper. I think I knew I would never see the house again. The banister was warm. It brought to mind the old house in Heysham. The hall carpet was covered in splinters from the broken door, and, seeing them, I wanted again to know the person I had been when I lived in the house unwatched. Who was the person who ascended the stairs each night, the priest in the house alone with a book and a candle by the bed? The noise out there, the shouts: it seemed to come from a place much deeper than I could ever know. The policemen pushed me into the van, a sheet over my head.

'Child molester! I hope ye burn in hell!'

I sat in the van with the darkened windows flashing silver with cameras, my head down, and then a man shouted again.
'I hope you burn in hell for what you did.'
The van moved away from the chapel and the crowd opened up, and I dwelled on the man's voice and wondered again if I knew it from the confessional.

My mother and I played cards each night and drank the best part of a 1962 Armagnac, the sound of her low black heels across the floor an echo of Morningside habits, the routines of comfort and sense. She has always been a great advocate of the hot bath and the stiff drink. Especially in a crisis, my mother knows how to behave like a good analyst, someone who feels your desertion was always part of the deal. She never tried to promote her own version of who I ought to be and she was careful never to mechanise the impulses of childhood. She had no smallness in that way.

Some people understand the need to be more than one person. That is one of her strengths and one of the things that shows my mother to be rather superior. She has been many people herself—the wife, the adventurous mother, the romance-seeker, the lady novelist—and during those days in Edinburgh she began by seeking no explanations. She introduced me to several new creams intended for the relief of stressed skin. She made a salade Niçoise with things from Valvona & Crolla. Every day in life she would go to her desk and work like a person expecting a cessation of talent or the final demise of her opportunity. She favours the notion that work defines one's moral worth. She said she was writing a rather windswept tale about the Viking invasion of Largs. And so, each evening, without a care for the modern world and its horrors, she'd return from her desk with colour in her cheeks, ready for olives and a glass of the old Marcel Trépout.

I'd go to the bathroom to be upset. It was a very moving room, her Guerlain perfumes lined up on the shelf, their perfect labels, their beautiful bottles with rounded shoulders, together telling a story about my mother's ventures in the years since my father died. Above the towels she kept a photograph of me on the Indian elephant, and there, against the window surrounded by strings of sparkling beads, one of Conor and me on Magdalen Bridge with sunglasses and ice creams. The room was a delicate mausoleum. The room was a shrine to self-sufficiency and it made me long for my own dear things and the Ayrshire garden of knots.

Four weeks before the trial, it felt like the horizon was clearing. I knew it couldn't be—the worst was yet to come—
but I decided to honour the feeling. I put on a new shirt fresh from a Jenners box and combed my hair and walked into my mother's study. The communal gardens looked busy with children and bees, the city just visible through an old sash window. T want to talk about it, Mother.'

'By all means,' she said. 'Take this armchair.'

'How's the book?' I said.

'Oh, rather coarse,' she said. 'It involves a quantity of devastating emotion on the headland. You know the sort of thing. My readers wouldn't have it any other way.'

'The books are great. Heaps of life.'

'You're very sweet,' she said, putting a pencil into a pot. 'I'm trying to create an innocent girl in a plaid wrap. She may or may not be carried off on a longship by a horny-helmeted gentleman.'

'Excellent,' I said.

'They'll love it in France,' she said.

'Is there sex?'

'Oh, buckets, my dear. It all happens by torchlight. The usual idea, I'm afraid. One seeks to make all the sexual encounters obscurely invigorating of the national cause.'

'Perfect.' She said what she said with a smile on her lips, bringing her hands together in a pleased and accomplished way. My mother has long since come to be at home with her nature and the manner of her talent. In conversation, she takes it for granted that many people are better than her, which, to my mind, almost guarantees that few are. She actually works very hard at her books. Spread on the desk in front of her, I could see pictures of gold ingots and reams of notes in her best handwriting. Her room had the wealthy
atmosphere of a place where imagination has lived and where tidy thoughts accumulated over the years.