Under the Rose (9 page)

‘Rome was the circus?’

‘Oh the Circus Maximus! What else?’ Lynch’s tone was lightly scornful. ‘I suppose you read the stories
about
him too? Later. In the press? Flimsy speculation amplified by gossip! To my mind they’d not have stood up in court. Remember what was said?’

Sean nodded. How forget? It was a year now since Sergeant Breen had delivered his tip-off. The day had been clear and cool. A breeze, ruffling the lake, made it shiver like foil, and the dazzle in Sean’s eye lingered long after he’d stepped, squinting, into the shade.

Broom in hand and clad in a cast-off cassock, he was busy cleaning the lake-side chapel for the May devotions when a shadow alerted him. The policeman stood in the arched doorway, blocking the light. The arch was narrow, and Breen was a burly man. The chapel, a Victorian-Gothic folly, stayed locked all winter, and Sean kept the key.

‘Mister Dunne!’

‘What can I do for you?’ Sean’s mock-formality matched the sergeant’s. He had been to school with Breen’s sons, Seamus and J.J., so being addressed as ‘Mister’ was either a joke or it meant something was up.

‘Let’s talk in my car.’ As Breen’s silhouette backed towards the light, the nap on his uniform glowed like filament.

Sean followed him out, then, once in the garda car, wished he had stopped to remove the niffy, soiled cassock. It was only good now for use as an overall when clearing out the mould and mouse-droppings which collected in the chapel every winter. One year he had found bats.

‘You’ve been a sort of volunteer sexton, have you?’ Breen put the car into gear. ‘Since Father Cronin’s day?’

There was something about his tone.

‘You know I have.’ Sean tried to get the cassock off, but
lacked space for manœuvre, and the cloth tore. Rotten! At one time he had enjoyed wearing the old garment. It had carried prestige, set off his waist, and swung pleasingly when he strode. A label with a coat of arms was sewn into one seam. The young Father Cronin had had it made by a Roman tailor, and in its day it had had style. Now, well … Sean started to undo the buttons.

‘Good thinking,’ said Breen. ‘Between myself and yourself, Father Mac doesn’t like you wearing that.’

‘Oh?’

‘I thought you should know.’

‘Did he ask you to tell me?’ That would be like the new PP. Father MacDermot, Cronin’s successor, was leery of local resentments and fond of delegating.

‘In a way.’ Breen drew up in a rough slot hacked out between tall rhododendrons. Once prized, these were now growing too vigorously, and foresters had turned against them. Blossoms, filtering the sunlight, threw purple patches on the grass. ‘Have a read.’ Breen handed Sean a folder of newspaper clippings. ‘It’s background. Father Mac wants you briefed before we meet the men from Dublin. They’re trying to mount a case against Cronin.’

‘Against Father Tim? What kind of a case? Who?’

The sergeant nodded at the folder. ‘That’ll help understand.’

Sean ran his eye over headlines which someone had haloed with a yellow marker. ‘
Roman Catholic monks
’, he read, ‘
to attend sex-offenders’ programme. Church in disarray. Former headmaster denies assaulting boys in dormitories. Priests to resume duties after police find no basis for allegations of abuse. Teacher at St Fiachra’s suspended pending
…’ St Fiachra’s was the school where Father Cronin had been teaching.

Sean handed back the file. ‘What’s this about?’ he asked. ‘I’m a gom and an innocent. Make it clear to me.’

‘Buggery,’ said Breen simply. ‘Child-abuse.’ A charge, he explained, had been made by a past pupil of Father Cronin’s,
and was being investigated. There was no corroborative evidence, so detectives planned to look into the priest’s record in this parish. ‘Two are coming down this afternoon. We got a message to say they’ll want statements from men who were close to Cronin when they were boys. Such as …’ Breen’s voice wobbled, ‘yourself. Mind you,’ steadying, the voice soothed, ‘it may all fizzle out.’

‘You can’t prove a negative.’ Mr Lynch gave Sean a shrewd look. ‘So if rumours bother you, you’d best up sticks and move. Go to Dublin. City people have no time to waste on the past. Here …’

‘My mother …’

‘Ah, I forgot. Bedridden, isn’t she? With arthritis? So you can’t leave.’

‘No.’

There was probably nothing to it, concluded Breen. Cases of this sort were often either fanciful or touched off by mental trouble. But even those stirred up a stink, and no way did Father Mac or the superintendent of the local gardai want fall-out reaching this parish. ‘I suppose that cassock was Cronin’s? Best give it to me.’ Getting out of the car, Breen took a plastic bin-liner from the boot, folded the cassock into it and stowed the package away. Returning to his seat, he said he hoped he’d made it clear that Father Mac and the super wanted us all to mind what we said to outsiders. That included Dublin detectives.

‘Discretion is in everyone’s interests. Tell them as little as you can.’ The big danger, Breen warned, was the press. Sensational newspaper stories could force the hands of the
gardai and maybe lead to cases for damages. Later. Down the road! ‘Then who do you think would be left with the bill? Not Dublin! Us.’ Breen’s tone was weary. His message whorled like the design on a finger print.

‘You weren’t serious,’ Lynch hoped, ‘just now about maybe saying “no” to the legacy.’

Sean blushed. ‘No.’

‘That’s all right so. Because if you did, people would see it as a guilty verdict. That, coming from you, would be damaging.’

‘There’s nothing
to
tell,’ Sean told Sergeant Breen. ‘Father Cronin was always an innocent.’

‘Good man. Stick to that.’

‘It’s true. He’s …’ Sean, who had been about to say ‘a lovely man’, didn’t, because just now the words did not sound innocent at all. Neither did ‘idealist’, which, he knew from Cronin himself, could be code for ‘disloyal’. ‘What are people saying?’ he thought to ask.

‘What
aren’t
they saying?’ Tipping his cap back on his poll, the sergeant threw up his eyes. ‘Mostly,’ he told the car ceiling, ‘they’re telling jokes about priests!’ Taking a last, red drag from his cigarette, he dropped it through the window, then opened the car door to stamp out the butt. As if ungagged, he began to talk angrily about priest-baiting. ‘It’s the new sport! People are taking revenge for the way they used to lick clerical boots. That’s how it goes! The wind changes and flocks attack their pastors. Killer sheep! Anti-clerical mice! They’ll turn on poor Cronin because they used to bow and scrape to him! They’ll have it in for you too because they used to envy your friendship with him. Nowadays if they saw you in a
cassock, they’d say you were in drag. Cassocks are out! Coats have been turned. Don’t look at me like that. I’m too old to turn mine, which is why I’m giving you the benefit of what I know. Steer clear of the lickspittle who gets a chance to spit! My granda told me it was the same when the English left.’

Breen raised his big, soft policeman’s palm. Wait, it signalled. ‘I know we all wore clerical gear when we were kids serving mass. I did and so did Seamus and JJ. But you kept it up.’

‘Jesus, Sergeant Breen!’

‘Sean, I’m trying to help. I know you don’t go much to pubs because of your father and all. So you mayn’t know what people are like now.’ The sergeant shook his head. ‘They’re rabid. Did you hear about the two altar boys in a parish I won’t name who tried to blackmail the priest? Threatened to accuse him of abuse if he didn’t pay them a hundred pounds apiece, so he denounced them from the pulpit. Guess what happened.’

‘The parish wanted to lynch them?’

‘Wrong! It wanted to lynch
him
.’ Breen’s fist thumped his palm. ‘What one parishioner told the gardai was that most priests – note the “most”! – only became priests so as to mess with boys. Girls were a risk, but boys were as safe as goats, and access went with the job. “There they used to be”, says this fellow, “rows of them with bare thighs and short pants. Choir boys, altar boys and the confirmation class. A sight more convenient than a trip to Thailand.”’

Breen’s snort of laughter could have been pure shock. The rhododendrons threw a purple splotch onto his already vivid face.

Sean had trouble taking all this in. ‘What harm did Father Cronin do anyone?’

‘Probably none.’ Breen’s mood had changed. Adjusting the peak of his cap, he started the engine. ‘We’ll do our best for him anyway. No need to tell the Dubliners that you and I talked. They asked who here had been close to him, so your
name came up. You
were
close, weren’t you? What’s this that Vincentian used to call you? The one who came every May for the fishing? When you and our J.J. were teenagers. Cronin’s “fidus Achates”, was it? What did that mean?’

‘How would I know?’ Sean remembered the Vincentian. Cheerful Father Jones, a demon at the dart board. He’d been one of a succession of holiday priests whose mass Sean had served in the island chapel. ‘Fidus?’ Sean guessed must be like the dog’s name ‘Fido’. Faithful?

‘Remember the talk of false memory syndrome?’ Lynch asked.

‘Of course. It showed the charges were lies.’

‘Not quite. It stopped them going to court. But stories are like viruses. They mutate.’

Driving past the lake’s sparkle where sharp waves tongued the shore, they reached the small cemetery whose roughly cut tombstones reflected the sparkle. ‘What’s that tag about not speaking ill of the dead,’ asked Breen. ‘De mort … what? You used to be a great one for the Latin tags.’

‘I forget.’

‘It’s a dumb message,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s the living we shouldn’t speak ill of. What harm can slanders do the dead?’

Sean, only half listening, burned to think how he’d gloried in being called Cronin’s ‘fidus Achates’. He hadn’t studied Latin, and the visiting priests must have thought him a parrot. No, it seemed likely now that they’d thought something worse! And Cronin let them. Hot with humiliation, Sean thought ‘bastard’, then told himself that no, the priest had been moved by – what? High spirits? Carelessness? Loneliness? Affection? Poor bastard! Poor Father Tim.

‘De mortuis’, he told Breen, ‘nil nisi bonum.’

‘That’s it,’ said the sergeant. ‘Nil nisi bonum! A pity we can’t manage that for the living? Here you are home. Someone will come for you when the Dubliners get in. In the morning, maybe around ten. Will that be all right?’

Sean said it would. Getting out of the car, he started up his own pathway.

‘Oh, I’ll forget my head yet,’ the Sergeant called after him. ‘I meant to tell you two other things.’ He lowered his voice. ‘One is that the fellow accusing Father Cronin isn’t suing him personally. Oh no! He’s suing the diocese for negligence. That’s what they do now. Go where the money is. That’s what all these buckos are after! Thousands they want in compensation. Millions if you add it all up. No wonder Father Mac is worried. The other thing is this. One of St Fiachra’s School yearbooks has a photo of the bloke when he was fourteen, which is when the abuse allegedly took place. He was the image of yourself at the same age.’

‘Of me?’ Sean stared. ‘What am I to make of that?’

‘No idea,’ Breen told him. ‘Not the foggiest. I just thought it best if you heard it from me and not one of the nosyparkers from Dublin. It might unsettle you coming from them.’

Sean’s mother was in bed. Her arthritis had flared up, so he brought her tea and listened to complaints about her medication’s side effects and general inadequacy. She didn’t ask where he had spent the morning. Then, very gingerly he removed the tray. Touching her painfully stretched skin and distorted bones was like handling a bag of eggs.

Taking a plateful of dinner with him – it was warmed-over stew – he went outside and, when he’d eaten it, used his licked fork to prick out a tray of rocket seedlings. The tines were just the right size for disentangling the fine, white, thready roots.
Next, using his fingers, he pressed the sooty compost around each stem. As always, he relished feeling the grain of it ooze soothingly under his nails. He had read somewhere that humans shared genes with plants, and was reminded of a picture Father Tim had had on his wall showing a naked girl turning into a tree. Already her fingers were leaves; the whole of her was as pale and frail as seedling roots, and Father Tim had told a story explaining what had made this happen. Sean couldn’t remember it. Some spell no doubt. Some enchantment.

As though the memory had caught him off guard, restraint peeled away and he began to shake. He had, he saw now, been holding himself in and down since the sergeant’s shadow fell on him this morning. He hadn’t allowed himself to think, even less to feel and now that he did, tears started to flow and he cried as he hadn’t done since he’d cried for his dead father. That, of course, was when Cronin had taken him in his arms. Was that what those bastards meant by ‘abuse’? Or was fear of the word – or of some addictive reality? – the reason why Cronin had only kissed and cuddled Sean that one time? He had soothed and stroked and held him tenderly – then stopped. Why had he stopped? And never done it again? Why? Was it Sean’s fault? Sean had wondered about that, but hadn’t liked to ask. How could he ask? He couldn’t. His life and Cronin’s were hedged in, blocked and braked like – like an arthritic’s. By now tears were pouring down his cheeks. They were running into his mouth and ears.

‘I think I’m jealous’, he said aloud, ‘of the abuse-victim. I am! I’m jealous of the bastard!’ Hearing his words, he laughed in shock and covered his face with his hands. It was true though. That was the real shock.

Lynch stood up and came round his desk. It was time for Sean to leave.

‘He told me’, said Lynch, ‘that you wrote him a great letter. When he was going through the dark night. Sensitive. Private. A bit mad, but comforting. Naturally I never saw it. But did you know that it was after he got it that he changed his will? He wanted to open things up for you, make
your
life a bit easier. Ah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’