The Good Priest

by Gillian Galbraith

  ‘Laura told me what you done to her,’ Houston said.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t done anything to her.’

  ‘No? Don’t give me that … shit! She’s my wife. I love her, I believe her!’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know what you mean,’ Vincent repeated, looking from one man to the other as if for an explanation.

  ‘Some fucking priest you are,’ Norman said, shaking his head in disgust, ‘like a wolf in fucking sheep’s clothing. Never understood why she went to your church in the first place. It’s all mumbo-jumbo – and now you’ve been laying your hands all over her.’

  ‘I never touched her!’

  ‘She was unhappy, depressed. She just needed a friend, someone to talk to,’ Houston added, suddenly raising his hands as if about to strike, ‘and you, you a priest, took advantage of her.’

  ‘No,’ Father Vincent said, ‘that’s not what happened at all. I have been counselling her, but, honestly, that’s all.’

  ‘Counselling – that’s a new word for it!’ Norman guffawed.

  ‘You calling my wife a liar?’ Houston demanded, his voice louder than before. ‘She’s my wife, you understand? She’s been lying to me, has she?’

  His mouth unpleasantly dry, Father Vincent said: ‘No, not lying. I’m sure she’s not lying, but I can assure you that I have never touched her … never taken advantage of her.’

  ‘Run out of nuns, eh?’ Norman chipped in.

  ‘You don’t belong here any more,’ Houston said. ‘Do you understand me?’

  ‘How do you mean? This is my home, this is where I live,’ Father Vincent replied, momentarily unable to think, puzzled by the man’s remark.

  As if enraged by his seeming defiance the two men advanced towards him and Norman poked him in the chest with a stubby forefinger.

  ‘Leave!’ he commanded.

  Shocked at this treatment in his own house, the priest did not immediately reply.

  ‘Leave!’

  This time it was Houston’s finger which prodded him, and as he did so the man growled in his ear, ‘Get the fuck out of here, Father, or we’ll be back and make you. Understand? Force you to go. Everybody knows about you and your ways now. We’ve made sure of that. Kinross doesn’t want you any more – not after what you done to Laura. You’re not a proper priest …’

  As Father Vincent remained silent, Norman slapped him hard across his cheek and, simultaneously, kicked him on the shin. Losing his balance, he fell to the ground, clutching his injured leg. Instantly, he felt a boot on his spine and then another kick, this time to his jaw. His mouth filled with blood and he almost choked on it, spluttering, finding himself spitting out one of his own teeth.

  ‘We mean it, Father,’ said Houston, bending over and delivering his message directly into the priest’s ear. ‘There’s no place for you here. Do you understand?’

  Vincent did not answer.

  A kick to his nose followed. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I heard you,’ the priest whispered, and the words were accompanied by the sharp whistling noise of his breath through the gap made by his lost tooth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Is that you, Dominic?’ Father Vincent asked, conscious once more of his new sibilance. In his mind’s eye he could picture the irritation on the Monsignor’s face as he realised the lateness of the hour.

  ‘It is, yes. To whom am I speaking?’ The voice at the other end sounded blurry with sleep.

  ‘Vincent Ross.’

  ‘Very good, Vincent. What do you want with me?’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, particularly so late, but …’ He hesitated, momentarily unable to find the words to describe his ordeal, knowing how sordid it would sound. ‘I know it’s late but … I’m in trouble. In my parish. I’m in trouble …’ The right words would not come.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been accused of … well, actually I’m not sure exactly what I am accused of. Having an affair – no, having sex with – one of my married female parishioners. I think that’s it … something like that.’

  ‘It is late, yes. Very late, and I was away at a conference in Birmingham all day. I didn’t get back until after nine. Forgive me, but could this not wait until the morning? It doesn’t, to be frank, sound like an emergency.’

  A pulsating pain was building up in his lower jaw. Vincent closed his eyes, forcing himself to continue talking. ‘I’m sorry, Dominic, but it is. I don’t think that it can wait. You see, the woman’s husband, plus one of his pals, a heavy, have just been here, after me, threatening me. With the Bishop still in hospital I thought I ought to speak to someone. To you, as you …’

  ‘Heavens above! Are you all right, Vincent? Did they hurt you?’ the Monsignor interjected, sounding startled and now fully awake.

  ‘Yes. Well, no, I’ve lost a tooth … otherwise I’m fine. But they say I have to leave – here, I mean, leave here. And they left me in no doubt that they meant it. So I’ll have to go … for the moment at least. Until everything settles down.’

  ‘Mother of God! They hit you? When did all of this happen?’

  Father Vincent glanced down at his watch. ‘I’m not sure. Forty minutes ago. Half an hour, maybe? I don’t know. I’ve just washed my mouth out, and then I contacted you. I wasn’t sure who to speak to, with James still being off.’

  ‘I’ll contact the Dean right away and he’ll be with you within the next hour. Somebody will be with you, to give you some support. Will you be all right on your own until he gets there?’

  ‘Fine, thanks, Dominic. I’ll be fine.’

  The paper tissue that he had been pressing against his mouth to staunch the bleeding had become soggy with blood. Disgusted, he threw it into the nearby bin and picked up his tumbler. His second mouthful of malt whisky went down more easily than the first, although he still did not enjoy the taste. It was as peaty and smoky as advertised, and therefore disgusting. But it would knock him out, be a good antiseptic, a good anaesthetic too, quite possibly. The ache in his jaw was thumping away, moving up through his cheekbone and into his already tender left temple.

  Satan, intuitively aware of his master’s trauma, sat on his knee, providing comfort with his heavy, warm presence. In the silence, the sound of his purr was as loud as a chainsaw. The telephone rang and he picked it up.

  ‘Vincent?’

  ‘Hugh!’ he replied, thrilled to hear his friend’s voice.

  ‘Good to …’

  The line went dead.

  ‘Hugh, for Christ’s sake, get a sodding mobile!’ he shouted down the receiver, before slamming it back onto its stand. The intense disappointment made him clench his teeth until he felt a fragment of his forcibly dislodged tooth crumble between them. Drink would wash it away.

  Screwing up his face in anticipation of the unpleasant flavour, he forced himself to take another swig, quickly gulping the whisky down. Once it had gone, his tongue, with unerring accuracy, returned to explore the crater where his missing lower incisor had once been. It felt vast. As he probed its pulpy surface again, his mind involuntarily flashed back to the exact second when the man’s boot made contact with his jaw. Feeling the kick afresh he instinctively put his hands in front of his face to ward off another blow. In his mind, the blows continued to land, with the shocking sound of the thud made by leather on flesh and bone. Unconsciously, he moved his lower jaw from left to right, right to left, checking that it had not been dislocated. Sickened by a sudden gush of salty blood into his mouth, he rose and began to walk up and down the room, trying to distract himself, jerk his brain out of its obsessive loop. Twice, and unaware that he was doing so, he poked himself in the chest as Mark Houston’s meaty hand had done, as if by repeating the action he would disarm it, rob it of its obnoxious significance. His pacing stopped only when the sound of the doorbell roused him, returned him to the present. Having peered through the dusty spyhole, he unlocked the front door to allow Father Bernard, the Dean, into his house.
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  The Dean stood in the vestibule, twirling his black umbrella from side to side, allowing the rain to drain from its gilded point onto the wooden floor by his feet. A satisfactory pool having accumulated, he removed his black Homburg from his head and tossed it like a deck quoit onto the nearby hook.

  ‘How are you, Vincent?’ he said, shepherding him with a stick-thin arm round his back into his own sitting-room as if he was elderly and confused and in need of guidance. Seconds after his entry, and effortlessly, he had taken over the territory, his authority exercised so lightly as to be almost imperceptible. Obeying him seemed natural.

  The disparity in size between the two men might, in other circumstances, have been comic. From his six-foot-six vantage point, the Dean literally looked down on the parish priest, as he did on most of humanity. It was difficult not to condescend from such a height and it, together with the way he carried himself, inspired confidence. A surprising number of people, reverting to some childhood pattern, found themselves deferring to Bernard Hume as to a benign parent. Steering the diminutive Father Vincent towards his own armchair, he gestured for him to sit down before planting himself by the fireplace and muttering, as if to himself, ‘Awful. It all sounds quite awful.’

  And then, looking into his colleague’s eyes properly for the first time, he added in an almost exaggerated tone of concern, ‘And your face – what on earth has happened to your face, Vincent?’

  ‘Would you like a drink, a whisky?’ Father Vincent asked, embarrassed by the whistle in his voice, pointing to the bottle by his chair.

  ‘Mmm … what is it? An eighteen-year-old, eh? My, my, that’s a generous offer,’ the Dean replied, picking up the bottle and bringing it to within an inch of his nose, checking the label again as if he could not believe what he had just read.

  ‘Dalwhinnie,’ he murmured, ‘I’ll certainly take a glass of that.’

  Father Bernard looked like the establishment man that he was. Central casting, had it been searching for someone to play a priest, would likely have rejected him because he was too close to type; he was overly handsome with a well-shaped head, clear brown eyes and fine cheekbones. He would have appeared clichéd, too unimaginative a choice to be true to life. Fortunately, his brethren, those who had elected him Dean, were unconcerned by considerations of dramatic plausibility. They knew him to be competent, ‘a safe pair of hands’ and, invariably, ‘the man for the job’. To be fair to him, he did not thrust himself forward. He did not need to. People came to him, and thus his ambition remained concealed, hardly recognised even by himself. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he was always the chosen one: the head boy, the chairman, the spokesperson, and he did not have a subversive bone in his body. Any tendency to unorthodoxy in others both mystified and disturbed him. A desire for anarchy was incomprehensible, and he considered disaffection to be the affliction of the bitter, the unsuccessful or the disappointed. To date, life had run smoothly for him, and he was unaware of the large part that luck, including his looks, had played in it. Preferment, he believed, simply followed ability. Everywhere, although he did not examine the reasons, his face fitted.

  Savouring the malt on his tongue, he glanced down at the battered figure opposite him, and, suddenly, felt a great rush of pity for him. He looked so small, so anxious, like a dormouse in shock having just escaped the blades of the combine-harvester. For a second, it crossed his mind to take the tartan rug from the wing of his chair and tuck him up, make sure he was warm and comfortable.

  ‘Tell me all about it, Vincent,’ he said, sitting down himself and pressing the sides of his tumbler with his long white fingers. As he listened, he nodded sagely, occasionally inserting a shocked ‘Really?’ or an outraged ‘No!’ Hearing about Laura Houston’s request for help, her problems, the frequent meetings and Vincent’s growing fondness for her, he knew already what was coming next. His own view, formed within less than five minutes, and which could be summed up as ‘What an unbelievable mess!’ remained unspoken. It would be unhelpful. And Father Vincent probably shared it by now. Loneliness, all too often, in his experience, led to a lack of judgement; and everyone knew that women, like tigers, were best admired from afar.

  Seeing his colleague’s empty glass, he gestured at the bottle as if to urge him to get a refill. The interruption, however, stopped Vincent’s story in mid-flow, as the embarrassment of his predicament hit home. Seeing an opportunity to move to other less painful topics, the Dean began to speak. There were, he said, the practicalities to attend to. Masses still had to be said, baptisms and funerals conducted. In short, the life of the parish must continue. As Father Vincent returned, almost involuntarily, to the subject of Sarah Houston, wondering out loud whether she had known about the assault before it happened, Father Bernard was flicking through the card index of his memory in search of a suitable standby.

  ‘I don’t think she can have,’ Father Vincent repeated, ‘because we were close. Genuinely close. Good friends, I thought. Too close, I now appreciate. But I’m sure she wouldn’t have let that happen.’

  ‘Father Roderick …’ the Dean interrupted, unaware of his non sequitur, pleased that the parish problem had been resolved. ‘He’s retired. But he’s helped out often enough before. He’s always willing.’

  ‘Father Roderick?’

  ‘He was at St Mungo’s – a good standby. Now, have you anywhere to stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ Father Vincent answered, massaging his bruised jaw with his fingers. ‘I think I’ll see if I can stay, for the moment, with the Sisters at the Red Retreat. For a bit anyway.’

  ‘The Red Retreat? Do I know it?’

  ‘It’s the rump of the old convent near Dunning. There are only seven sisters left now. They offer retreats, reiki, talking therapies … my pal Sister Monica’s in charge.’

  ‘Monica McDermott? Doctor McDermott – with the build of a sumo wrestler – learned scholar and all round tough egg? That’s one powerful woman.’

  ‘I like powerful women.’

  ‘Each to his own, Vincent. But you’re more than welcome to use my spare room for a while if you prefer.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve already spoken to her.’

  ‘You’ve no parents left, no relatives, no siblings even?’ the Dean said, standing up and shaking his umbrella to get rid of the last remaining droplets.

  ‘I’ve a brother but … we’re not close. He’s married, got a very busy job. Our lives have taken different paths.’

  ‘Right. I’ll ring Dominic tomorrow and he’ll be in touch in the very near future, I’m sure. He’ll let you know where we go from here. Now, the police …’

  Seeing his pet slinking past the open door, and suddenly struck by the realisation that his household was likely to be split up, Vincent exclaimed, ‘Satan! What shall I do with Satan?’

  ‘Satan?’ Father Bernard replied, baffled.

  ‘My Siamese cat. No, it’s obvious. Of course, he’ll have to go into kennels or something.’

  ‘Yes, kennels or a cattery, or something,’ the Dean echoed, nodding, patting Vincent on the shoulder and looking around for his hat. ‘But have you spoken to the police yet, Vincent?’

  ‘No, I contacted Dominic. I thought I’d better speak to him first.’

  ‘Quite right too. He and I discussed it. It’s up to you, of course, but at the moment everything is still within the family, a Church matter. We don’t want a scandal, do we, if we can avoid it? Our view, quantum valeat, is to let sleeping dogs lie, otherwise we up the ante, don’t we – involving outside agencies. We don’t want to lose control, if we can keep it. We certainly don’t want the press involved. All it would do is damage the Church further.’

  ‘No police. I don’t want Sarah Houston’s name involved, and a criminal conviction for her husband won’t help her. There are children too. No doubt, the big brute will get his come-uppance from somewhere or other. Soon, I hope.’

  The thin plasterboard walls of his room at the Red Retreat confined him. It was a guest
room, blandly painted and blandly furnished. No one could be offended by it; or feel at home in it. The accommodation in a Holiday Inn had more character. In the fake fireplace, a bunch of fake flowers gathered dust, and a single reproduction watercolour in a gilt frame hung above it. The picture showed a vase of poppies, each bloom less red, more blurry and insipid than the last. Instead of the familiar scent of honey from his bee-suit, the air reeked of soap from the nearby laundry room.

  Showing him round it with suitable proprietorial pride, Sister Monica had informed him that the lack of an ashtray was deliberate policy, thus letting him know, in her oblique way, that smoking was not permitted. Finding herself unable, because of her bulk, to manoeuvre between the bed and the armchair, she apologised for the smallness of the room. Its saving grace, in Father Vincent’s opinion, was the view from it of the world outside. It was a wide vista of the distant hills, high and wild, clothed in a faded green, occasionally interspersed with the gunmetal grey of scree. Trees, dwarfed and windblown, hugged the lower slopes as if clinging onto them for their own dear lives. One peak in particular caught the eye. It loomed above the others, casting dark shadows on its neighbours, an exposed rock face on it recalling its ancient past as a quarry.

  Within days of his arrival he had bought an OS map of the area from Waterstones, and amused himself by locating in the scenery the features named ‘Hologrogin’, ‘Rossie Law’ and ‘Marcassie Bridge’. Sometimes, looking at the broad landscape in the warm tangerine light of dusk, he felt almost intimidated by it, unnaturally exposed within it. It was so large, so different from the enclosed town-scape with which he was familiar and the mellow, fertile land surrounding it. The absence of a loch reflecting the ever-changing skies struck him every time he looked out, making the scene feel as abnormal as a face without a nose. But the nuns loved it, he reminded himself. They were drawn to its grandeur, even if to him it seemed cold, hard and unapologetically impersonal. There were no dwellings arranged higgledy-piggledy beside each other, no pavements, no shops, play-parks or people. No people. If massacres came to mind in the windswept bleakness of Glencoe, they seemed not too far away here. Opening the window he could hear only the songs of moorland birds: the mournful cries of curlews, peewits and oystercatchers. In retrospect, the perpetual hum of traffic in his parish seemed soothing as a lullaby, and he missed it.