The Gospel Of Judas (6 page)

‘You haven’t made me cross.’

‘Yes I have. I can tell better than you can yourself. I know that expression. But I just wanted to know. You probably don’t understand, but I wanted to know.’

He watched her go out into the noise of the party, watched the quick and artful way she switched mood as the laughter and chatter greeted her in the other room. He watched her join the party and he thought of Elise. A lifetime trying to banish her image to the depths of his psyche, but still it rose to the surface. Elise, who had come nearest to breaking through whatever barriers he had set up in adolescence; Elise, who had almost upset the strange physics of sublimation that is the key to celibacy. Even after all those years he could picture her still, as though she was sitting out there on the sofa amongst the crowded adults of Madeleine’s party, her knees demurely together, her patent leather shoes carefully parked side by side. He had been nineteen, Elise a mere fifteen. She possessed a pretty and totally mendacious downward cast of the eyes, rosy cheeks that might have been applied with rouge, rather heavy eyebrows, and a faint, dark down at the corners of her upper lip. The little pianist. She used to play ‘Für Elise’, partly because that was her name but mainly because it was also the only piece she could manage at all competently, being too lazy, so his mother said, to practise.

Laziness is next to sinfulness
, his mother said.

Remove occasion for sin and you remove the sin
, she said.

But the memory? How do you expunge that?

It was one day during the Easter holidays that Elise came round to the Newmans’ flat. Leo had never met her before, never even seen her, had no idea who she was when he opened the front door to her and found her standing there on the doormat that said
WELCOME
but didn’t really mean it. The girl was slightly pigeon-toed – patent leather pigeon-toed. Her blue dress hovered uncertainly between
childhood and adolescence, having flowers scattered across its surface and a bow at the back, but also an ample
décolletage
that lifted and displayed precocious breasts. A pleasing blush touched her cheeks. The blush was, he could feel, reflected in his own face.

‘Is Mrs Newman in?’

‘She’s out.’

‘Who are you, then?’

‘Her son.’

‘I have a piano lesson with her.’

‘I thought she rang to cancel it.’

The girl shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘No, she didn’t.’ And Leo smelt the sour and flinty stench of mendacity, for he
knew
that his mother had telephoned. He had heard her make the call.

‘Maybe you should come in and wait,’ he suggested. His blush deepened, with shame for the girl and shame for himself as he compounded her lie: ‘I don’t think she’ll be long.’ For behind the smell of mendacity there was something else: the subtle, physical perfume of complicity. She
would
be long. His mother’s cousin was ill. Her cousin lived somewhere out of London and his mother would be gone until late evening, leaving him all alone to study for looming examinations. Theology. Classical Philosophy. Ancient History.

Remove the occasion and you remove the sin
.

Leo Newman, awkward and withdrawn junior seminarian, stood aside and invited the occasion in, and it sat there prim and rapacious before him in the chintz armchair where his mother normally sat, its knees pressed together, its mouth (a dark red bud like the mouth of a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna) pursed in an expression of studied allure, its patent leather shoes settled on the carpet like tiny little
coffins; while the crucified Christ watched from the wall above the piano on whose lucid surface the silver-framed relatives (dead father, deader grandparents) watched like a grim jury.

‘Tea?’ he asked. ‘Would you like tea?’

Yes, she told him, yes she would like tea.

Inviting Elise in and assuring her of his mother’s imminent return was also the only initiative that he took in the whole of the affair. Every other move – the artful, arch conversation they held over a cup of tea, the promise to meet in the Botanical Gardens the following afternoon, the hot, damp kisses which they finally exchanged two weekends later, all of those were Elise’s. Elise was practised and eager: he was hesitant and shy. ‘You do
this
, you silly,’ she said, and he found her tongue, as wet and warm as a tropical fish, flapping around inside his mouth. ‘And if you touch my bosom I will
not
mind, although you may not put your hand up my skirt, for that is vulgar so early on in our relationship.’ Her breast was a soft bud of a thing, live beneath his fingers. As he touched it she remained as still as a bird.

There followed a season of assignations without his mother’s knowledge, a random collection of walks along the canal, of nervous and distasteful gropings on discreet park benches (once they were moved on by a policeman, another time shouted at by a woman), all culminating in a climactic visit to a malodorous cinema during which Elise reversed her previous proscription. Her breath in Leo’s ear was a soft and sultry thing, more sensation than suggestion: ‘Touch me
there
,’ it whispered. And he did, twisting his hand upward and inward (an awkward trick that he could only improvise) over nylon and a curve of bare flesh, past elastic, past gusset, to find the sudden surprise of hair
and a soft and malleable wetness, like something that one might discover, groping with blind hands, in a rock-pool: something bearded and molluscan.

Excitement? Tumescence? Of course. And revulsion. Elise stirred in her seat, as though in some kind of pain. Leo stopped and withdrew his hand. He felt stained with sin, and his fingers were glutinous with the material evidence of it.

‘Where are you
going
?’ she whispered.

Remove the occasion and you remove the sin
. Remove the evidence and you remove the sin. He was going to wash, in the inadequate benison of cold water, amidst the familiar, comforting, ammoniac smell of the men’s lavatory. And when he returned she was sitting there in the shadows with her eyes on the screen – Elvis Presley? – and her skirt down to her knees and her mind on other matters. ‘Did you
do
it?’ she whispered as he resumed his seat.

‘Shhhh!’ a voice urged from behind.

‘Do what?’ Leo asked. He watched her profile in the light thrown back from the screen. She was smiling. ‘You know what I mean,’ she whispered. ‘If you’re good,
I’ll
do it for you next time. I’ve done it to boys before, you know. I know how.’

Sin and the occasion of sin. Remove the occasion and you remove the sin. The first and foremost rule of celibacy.

‘You have been walking out with Elise,’ his mother remarked unexpectedly the next day. It was often difficult to judge her tone. Anger? Impatience? Reproach? There was no point in denying the matter. Doubtless one of her friends had spied on them (that shouting woman?) and reported the matter to head office. She watched him coldly as he sat there blushing, and behind his blush was the remarkable thought that, beneath his mother’s skirt, between her bony thighs,
couched in ample
directoire
knickers, she too was like
that
. Sin was always there, lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting like a rapist.

‘You must stop seeing her,’ she said flatly. ‘It would not be right if you should become too close, and it is impossible to see much of a young girl without becoming too close.’ And then she smiled. She smiled across the tea-table, the doors open behind her on the exiguous urban garden where sunlight came down in curtains amongst the glistening shrubs. Her smile was a small banner of triumph hung across her face. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘Elise Goodman is a Jewess.’

‘We all of us suffer from temptations of the flesh. Of one kind or another.’ Thus one of young Leo’s instructors in the seminary, facing up to the troubling issue of Elise and her like, pacing around his study as though he might surprise wanton lust hiding among the bookshelves and the armchairs and the prie-dieu. A crucified Christ hung reproachfully on the wall in front of the student’s gaze. ‘Remember that in canon law only a complete man may be ordained priest. Neither eunuch, nor homosexual. So you mustn’t worry about such desires, and nor must you dwell on them. My advice is …’ the priest lowered his voice lest the heresy be overheard ‘… to find relief for yourself if it becomes too much to support.’ He rubbed his hands briskly, almost as though to show the way. ‘It is –
was
– my experience that such feelings are transient and superficial and once you have found relief they disappear. Rather like quenching one’s thirst. Once you have had a glass of water the matter is closed. Of course, this is only a … ah … stopgap method. An emergency. A lesser sin in order to assuage a greater. It must not become
habit. With discipline and prayer, you should be able to obviate the need for such emergency measures. Remove the occasion and you remove the sin. Sublimation is what the psychologists call it’ – he was a self-confessed liberal, this paternal father – ‘but it is really no more than directing our energies to the service of the Lord.’ He smiled and patted Leo on the knee encouragingly.

Thus Elise and her kind were banished to hidden parts of Leo’s mind. Thus he was reconciled with his mother. Thus he was reconciled with his vocation. The ritual of the liturgy and the demands of faith re-established their equilibrium. All the answers you may wish for lie within faith, but it demands a complete and incontinent surrender, an immersion as total as any baptism. Indeed baptism is a kind of enactment of the surrender: you bathe in faith, you swim in it, you live by it, surrounded by it, buoyed up by it, engulfed by it. You
drown
in it, for at times it takes your breath away as entirely as any lungful of water. The sheer outrage of it, the boldness of it, the incomparable drama of the fact that the universe, the whole universe, condensed itself into the form of one single man and that he walked this earth and walks it still.

‘The word
faith
,
pistis
, and its derived verb
pisteuo
, occurs more than 240 times in the New Testament. John employs the verb ninety-eight times. Often it is qualified with the preposition
eis
, with the significance
into
. This is the significance given to saving faith, the need to commit body and soul to a union with Christ. Elsewhere it is qualified by
epi
, upon …’ Thus Leo Newman, a new man, lecturing to a group of young seminarians, and feeling like a soldier who has been to the front line and heard the shells coming down, and is now passing the experience on to raw recruits. Soldiers of Christ, they look back at
him with earnest faces, hoping that he will teach them the tricks of survival. It was interesting to find the same military metaphor employed by a former pupil, now a priest running a parish in Liverpool:

I remember your lectures in the seminary
, he wrote.
We looked to you as one of the examples to follow, one of the leaders who would show us the way forward into battle, and now see what you have done. How many souls have you dragged down to the flames with you? How many innocent lives are lost?

All the answers lie in faith; and when you lose your faith you have no choice but to substitute for it a philosophy that deliberately and coldly offers no answers at all.

Take a family group out on a picnic. To Sutri and the Etruscan country to the north of Rome. To woods and sudden gorges, to brown cliffs punctuated with tombs, and hidden, bramble-ridden staircases. Jack was driving the first car, with friends (Howard and Gemma from London, staying the weekend) in the next. Newman was in the back of the leading car, an extra, something sterile but vaguely interesting, like an artefact from some remote archaeological period. There were also the two daughters, newly back from boarding school, seated on either side of him and on either side of the great divide of self-consciousness, the older one, Katz, consumed with blushes and silence whenever he spoke, the other, Claire, stark in her observation of his condition. ‘You don’t
look
like a priest,’ she said.

‘What do priests look like?’

‘Priests are just ordinary people,’ Madeleine put in, glancing over the front seat at the girls.

‘No they’re not. Priests are boring.’

There was laughter from the adults.

‘Father Leo’s not boring. He’s quite famous, really. He writes about the Bible in the newspapers.’

Newman tried to change the subject. ‘The Pope’s a priest,’ he suggested.

‘The Pope’s boring,’ the younger child asserted, and Catherine blushed for shame.

‘The Pope loves every one of us,’ Madeleine said. ‘
That’s
what makes him just a teeny bit dull.’

Outside the town there was the ancient amphitheatre, and rows of tombs in the cliff. They parked the car and went to look. ‘Where are the dead people now?’ Claire asked, peering in the open doorways at damp, bare floors. ‘Did they go to heaven?’

It was an intriguing theological point. ‘Where
did
they go,’ Madeleine asked, ‘all those millions who could never have known about Christ for the simple fact that they lived before he was even born?’

‘We don’t know,’ Leo said.

‘Well, we can’t just dismiss them, can we? They were, in their time, as real as you and me. Even now, if death has no dimension of time, they remain as real as, say, your dead mother or my dead father.’

‘Limbo,’ suggested Jack. ‘Isn’t that the special place you’ve dreamt up for that kind of problem?’

‘Limbo’s for babies, silly,’ answered the older of the two girls.

The little theological debate spluttered on as the group looked round the tombs. The path led along the foot of a cliff and then climbed a moss-shrouded ramp to where a sign announced the chapel of the Madonna del Parto, Our Lady of Birth – once, so the guidebook said, a mithraeum. The
place was entirely excavated from the rock: pillars, aisles, a narrow apse, everything. It smelt of damp and age, a sour, claustrophobic smell. ‘Leo knows all about mithraeums,’ Madeleine said to her husband. ‘Or should that be mithraea? He took us to one underneath San Clemente.’