Earthly Powers (2 page)

       "My secretary, Geoffrey Enright."

       The archbishop was a few years younger than myself, evidently vigorous though very plump; being plump, not much lined or wrinkled. We eyed each other with friendly wariness, opposed in trade but united in our generation. I noted, in my frivolous way, that we all made up a reasonable poker hand—two pairs, Ali discarded. I said to Ali in Spanish: "Gin and tonic. Then you can go."

       His Grace sat now at one of the three tables, draining his glass first then rocking it humorously in his hand. He was very much at home. This was, after all, his archdiocese.

       I said, "It's perhaps, after all, too early for drinks. Would you like tea?"

       "Oh yes," the chaplain cried, turning with eagerness from myself and Mae West outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, "tea would be very nice."

       "Drinks," pronounced the archbishop. And he told Ali, in Maltese-Moghrabi, to give him the same again. Then, he seemed to say, Ali could go. "This lovely house," he said. "These lovely gardens and orchard. I have visited here often. In the time of Sir Edward Hubert Canning. In the time of the late Mrs Tagliaferro. Father Azzopardi, I know, would be very delighted to be shown all around or about it, everything, by Mr... by your young friend here with the mirrors on his eyes. The young, is it not, Mr Toomey? These young people. The house was, this you may not know or perhaps may know, it was built in 1798 when Buonaparte invaded. He sent the Knights away. He tried to restrict or constrict the powers of the clergy." His Grace chuckled grimly. "He did not succeed. The Maltese people would not have it. There were incidents. There were deaths."

       I took my gin and tonic from Ali and brought it to the table. I sat down opposite the archbishop, who had already been served with a large neat Claymore. "Well," I said to Geoffrey, "you have your instructions. Show his ah reverence around the house and gardens. Give him tea."

       Father Azzopardi drained his glass of whatever it was with nervous haste and began to cough. Geoffrey banged him on the back with excessive energy, saying at each stroke of his fist, "Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault."

       "Geoffrey," I said sharply, "that is not funny."

       Geoffrey put out his tongue and led coughing Father Azzopardi off. His Grace made one final Semitic joke at Ali, who too, laughing, went off. "A good boy," His Grace said, "one can see that. These young people," he added, nodding toward Geoffrey's voice that could be heard, full of aspirated stresses, moving toward green and sunlight. And then: "You play bridge here, I should think. A room pleasantly appointed for the playing of bridge," his eyes on the shelves full of bottles. "A harmless and civilised pastime." He raised his fat hand in what seemed to be both a blessing on the game and a gesture of regret that he could not accept, ever, an invitation to come and play. "I played. I play no longer. I have far too much work. His late Holiness too played. And then he too had far too much work. This you will know." His modest smile was meant, I assumed, to diminish the comparison.

       So, as I had been foretold in that Vatican letter, the visit was to be about His late Holiness. I said, "When Carlo was raised so high, his bridge-playing days were already over. Far too much work, as you say, as he said. But he had been a superb player—very clever and fierce. Like Mrs Battle, you know."

       His Grace had not heard of the lady. "Ah yes, I can believe that. Clever and fierce. But also human, or is it humane? Perhaps both. But also a saint." He looked at me with small unwilling awe. Carlo, I had said.

       I was ready to joke about there being no bridge saints, but that would have been cheap and unworthy. Instead, I said, "I know of the proposal, naturally. I gather there is still much to be done."

       His Grace waved the hand that was not holding his drink. "I speak, of course, of course—"

       "Proleptically?"

       "You are a master of the language, Mr Toomey. It will, I fear, be always a foreign language to me. The language of the Protestant, if you will forgive me. That you are a master is well known. I have little time, of course, for reading. I have been often told that you are a master of the English language."

       "Something," I said, "that most Maltese must be content to be told. Those interested, I mean. They are forbidden to find out for themselves."

       "Oh, one or two of your books are permitted. This I know. But our people must be protected, Mr Toomey. But I think that soon our censorship may be a little bit relaxed. There is a new spirit abroad, at home as well, aha. Already you may now buy the works freely of the atheist Monsieur Voltaire. In French, too."

       "Deist, not atheist." I knew what he was here for, but I decided to use pretended ignorance to get a point in. "Archbishop," I said, "I take it you are not here in any shall I say pastoral capacity? You will know, I think, that I was born in the faith. But I propose to die out of it. I have lived long enough out of it. I ought to make my position absolutely clear." And yet I gulped on that faith.

       "You propose," he said cheerfully. "Man proposes." And then: "No no no, oh no. One thing I have learned, we are all learning, His late Holiness was, aha, very clever and fierce in teaching us all, one thing is that there are many ways to salvation. But let me put it this way to you, Mr Toomey. You know the Church. Whatever you are now, you are not a Protestant. Certain doctrines, words, terms—these have meaning for you. I am right, I think."

       "Permit me to give you more whisky," I said, taking his glass and getting up, stiff, an old man. "Allow me to offer you a cigar. Or a cigarette."

       "A lethal action, smoking," he said without irony. "Smoking makes the life shorter. Just a little drop, then." I took a cigarette for myself from the Florentine leatherbound box on the counter. There was also a huge wooden bowl from Central Africa full of matchbooks, trophies of the world's airlines and hotels. I had toyed once with the notion of a travel book arranged on the aleatory taking out of matchbooks from this bowl, rather like filthy Norman Douglas's autobiography based on the random selection of visiting cards. It had come to nothing. There is sense, however, in keeping a bowl full of such trophies: there are addresses and telephone numbers there, as well as a palpable record of travel helpful to an old man's memory. I lighted my cigarette with a match from La Grande Scene, a restaurant at the top of the Kennedy Centre in Washington, 833-8870. I could not for the life of me remember having been there. I puffed and shortened my life. Then I gave His Grace his whisky. He took it without thanks, a kind of intimacy. He said, as I sat down again: "The word miracle, for example." He looked at me sharply and brightly.

       "Ah, that. Yes, well, I received a letter, a note rather, from my old bridge. playing acquaintance Monsignor O'Shaughnessy."

       "Ah, the bridge I did not know about. Interesting."

       "He mentioned the virtues of the personal approach. I see his point. Some things do not go well on paper. For all that, they seem to be building up a vast dossier of saintly evidence. A piece of evidence from a known apostate and self-proclaimed rationalist and agnostic would be of far greater value than the testimony of some superstitious old peasant woman in black. This is what Monsignor O'Shaughnessy's note seemed to imply."

       His Grace swayed rather gracefully on his bottom, flashing his rings. "To me," he said, "he spoke when I was in Rome. It is strange, Mr Toomey, you must admit it, it is even bizarre, if that is the word—yourself, I mean. I mean a man who has rejected God—that is what they would say in the old days, now we are more careful—and yet had such close contacts with—I mean, you could write a book, is not that true?"

       "About Carlo? Ah, Your Grace, how do you know I haven't? In any case, it would never get into Malta, would it—a book by Kenneth Marchal Toomey about the late Pope. It would be bound to be well, not hagiography."

       "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy mentioned to me that you have already written some little thing. You wrote it while he was still alive. Before he became what he at last became."

       "I wrote a certain short story," I said. "About a priest who—Look, my Lord Archbishop, you can read the story for yourself. It's in my three volumes of collected stories. My secretary could hunt you out a copy."

       He looked at me. Was there bitterness there, was there shame? One should never say that one had no time for reading. It meant, with him, no time for my kind of irreligious trash. But there were times when even a great cleric should be prepared to do his homework. "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy," he mumbled in a very un-Maltese manner, "telephoned to me yesterday, saying that he had read somewhere that it was your birthday today. That it was a good day for me to come. There was some article on you, he said, in an English newspaper."

       "Last Sunday's Observer. The article has not, officially speaking, been read by anyone in Malta. The reverse page carried a large article, copiously illustrated, on ladies' swimwear. The censors at Luqa Airport cut it out. They thus also cut out the little birthday article on myself. I received an uncensored copy through the British High Commission. In the bag, as they put it."

       "Yes yes, I see. But our people must be protected. But some of these men with their scissors at the airport are not of the most educated. However, there it is."

       "While we're on the subject, I may as well tell you that the General Post Office in Valletta have, after some trouble, kindly allowed me to have a copy of the poems of Thomas Campion that was sent to me, a limited edition of some value. They said that they had at last discovered that Thomas Campion was a great English martyr, so it must be all right."

       "Good, that is good, then."

       "No, not good. The great English martyr was Edmund, not Thomas. Thomas Campion wrote some rather dirty little songs. Clean songs too, of course, but some quite erotic."

       He nodded and nodded, not displeased. Something or other, my agnostic depravity probably, was confirmed from my own mouth. He seemed unabashed at his ignorance of English martyrology.

       "Well, now, that is very interesting. But it is the other thing we are concerned about." He was right, the conversational economy of the confessional against the author's tendency to divagate. "And, of course, to wish you a happy birthday yet again." He toasted me, smiling plumply. Absent-mindedly, I toasted myself.

       "Monsignor O'Shaughnessy says that you are said to have said in some interview or somewhere about there not being any doubt of the miracle. That you witnessed it. And so I am to offer you every facility to set down, to write, to make some little—"

       "Deposition?"

       He played an invisible concertina for two seconds. "Your mastery of the language. Canonization. Miracles. It is the usual thing. Your Thomas More, man of all seasons. Joan of Arc."

       "In what way are you to offer me every facility? I have paper, a pen, a sort of memory. Ah, I think I know what is meant. I am not to put off doing it. I am to be prodded. The saint-making is somewhat urgent."

       "No no no no, you are to take your time."

       I smiled at him, seeing my jawed grimness in the fine old mirror over the bar, a genuine antique that advertised Sullivan's Whiskey. "So I, who don't believe in saints, am involved in the making of a saint. Very piquant. Bizarre, to use your own term."

       "It is surely only a matter of the fact. It is not even a matter of you using the word miracle. It is a matter of you saying that you saw something that could not by normal means be explained." He seemed to be growing bored already with his assignment, but suddenly a spark of professional concern animated his brown droll eyes. "And yet surely miracle is the only word for what is seen clearly to be happening but cannot be explained except except—"

       "—As the intervention of some force unknown to common sense or to science."

       "Yes yes, you will admit that?"

       "Not altogether. The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It's just a matter of waiting."

       "But this. It was in a hospital somewhere, was it not? And the doctors had despaired of the life of whoever it was? Yes?"

       "It happened a long time ago," I said. "And I don't know whether you, Your Grace, would understand this, but writers of fiction often have difficulty in deciding between what really happened and what they imagine as having happened. That is why, in my sad trade, we can never be really devout or pious. We lie for a living. This, as you can imagine, makes us good believers—credulous, anyway. But it has nothing to do with faith." I shut up; I could feel my voice beginning to crack—on that word.

       "Aaaaah," he sighed. "But there will be witnesses other than yourself. People who do not lie for a living." What was meant to be a mere echo of my own words took on in his voice the tone of frivolous sin. "If you can get witnesses, it will be the better. There are hard men, you see, who must pretend that they do not want the canonization. They are called the advocates of the devil." That too sounded terrible.

       "Witnesses?" I said. "Oh, heavens, it was so long ago. I honestly think you'd better go to some old peasant woman in black."

       "No hurry," he said. His glass emptied, he got up. I got up with him. "You cannot be forced. You are to consider it, at least consider. That is all." He pointed his archepiscopal ring toward the picture gallery of myself and the great. "I see," he said, "that he is not there." He had had a look at them then, a minor bit of homework, the cheating kind done in a rush in school just before the teacher comes in, seeking a picture of Voltaire and Christ together, smiling, godless artists and actresses all about.

       "That," I said with finicking care, "is a secular portrait gallery. Although there, you see, is Aldous Huxley." And I gestured at myself grim and the stone-eyed mescaline saint laughing.