by Simon Mawer
It seemed ridiculous. In the face of this woman, this table, this narrow Roman street, the matter-of-factness of hundreds of years of material history, the whole thing seemed suddenly absurd. ‘It’s an account of the life of Christ.’
She laughed. ‘I thought that had already been written.’
‘This is different. It claims to be a true eyewitness account.’
‘Claims.’
‘I’ve read it. The prologue anyway. It’s enough.’
‘Enough for what?’
‘Enough to undermine everything. My faith. The whole Faith, perhaps.’ The capital letter sounded in his ears. The Faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. There was silence there behind the laurel hedge with tourists going past and the couple behind the bar arguing about their summer. He looked at Madeleine’s faintly freckled skin, at the delicate, precious flaws in her complexion, at the eyes that wavered between green and brown and watched him with an intensity that he had never known before, as though by looking they were possessing. And offering as well. And exacting something in return.
‘It’s Judas,’ he said finally. The name lay in the air between them like a threat, a name with all the emotional baggage of two thousand years of opprobrium. ‘Judas Iscariot. The scroll claims to be the writings of Judas Iscariot. It gives his name. Partly it is in the first person. It claims to be an eyewitness account of the crucifixion.’
She frowned. ‘Are you serious?’
‘That’s the claim.’
‘It’s genuine?’
‘Difficult to see how it could be a forgery. It hasn’t been opened yet, but––’ He shook his head. But what? It would be opened. He would read it. The whole ornate and arcane edifice of Christianity would come tumbling down. There were tears in his eyes, sharp, acid tears. ‘It claims …’ His voice faltered, for any claim was surely absurd, fantastic. Yet Judas whispered in his ear, his voice quiet and measured as it sounded across the centuries of faith: … he died and did not rise and I myself witnessed the body in its corruption … ‘The author claims that he saw the decaying body of Christ, and that he didn’t rise from the dead.’
He felt the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand. ‘Poor Leo,’ she whispered. She picked up his hand and held it against her cheek as though it were the dearest thing that there could be, his dry and sinewy hand that was a mere machine of tendon and ligament and bone. ‘Poor, fragile Leo.’ She kissed him in the palm. He felt the press of her face and the intensity of her presence, just there within his literal grasp and it seemed to him the most startling of intimacies. ‘Poor poor Leo, learning at last the only lesson that life has to give.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That there is nothing else. That there is only you and me, now, at this moment and this place. All else is no more than empty hope.’
The flat high up under the roofs of the Palazzo Casadei, the Palace of the House of Gods. She took his hand as they went inside, kissed him lightly on the cheek, helped him make tea neither of them really wanted, talked all the while, a light, bantering talk that he couldn’t manage. Could the mundane intrude on the momentous in this way? She complained about the disorder in the kitchen, the lack of decent equipment and that kind of thing. She had gathered up her hair to keep it out of the way as she worked and he stood behind her and watched what he had never really seen before, the hidden, secret intimacy of the nape of her neck, the subtle hollow between two taut tendons, fragile wisps of hair. The saucepan of water came to the boil and she plucked it from the flame.
‘Jack’s away until tomorrow.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Whatever you want it to mean. There you are.’ She turned and handed him his tea, as though that were the reality, that and her presence here in his flat, and all matters of papyrus scrolls or belief or faith or husbands were just nonsense. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘About what?’
She eyed him over the rim of her cup. ‘Don’t be idiotic. About this, us.’
The volcano shuddered somewhere far beneath his feet. ‘Bewildered, I suppose. As though nothing is quite real.’
She nodded in agreement. Perhaps all this was familiar to her, coming as she did from the foreign world of sexuality. Perhaps bewilderment was one of the symptoms, part of the aetiology of the disease. They sipped at their tea, more to justify the making of it than out of any need, and then without another word, as though things had already been rehearsed, they got up from the table and went through into the other room, his bedroom, a room that until now had been as desolate as any abandoned attic.
The sound of cars came up from the street outside. Twin Madeleines, one real, the other reflected in the wardrobe mirror, crossed the room to crouch down and close the shutters. A sudden twilight descended. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked as she turned back. ‘Leo, is there anything wrong?’
He told her that he was fine. He told her that he loved her and that he wanted to be there, and that he was fine. He told her this as, smiling, she unbuttoned his shirt and held her face against his chest. And he was shocked how his own body – something towards which he had learned to show nothing but indifference – could matter to her; and how she could matter to it.
A motorbike scoured the length of the street below the windows. There was the complaint of trapped cars, the grumble of a bus. In the shadowy room Leo and Madeleine undressed modestly back to back and then turned towards each other at the same moment, almost as though they were taking part in some preordained ritual, the liturgy of love perhaps. The act of looking at her seemed a heresy. There were freckles scattered across her chest. Her breasts were large and blunt and scrawled with veins like pencil lines; her belly was pleated with the marks of child-bearing. Clothed she had seemed small, small and precise, an artefact beautifully made, a thing to marvel at; naked she filled the space beneath the sloping roof, her flesh luminous in the false twilight. Close to, her flesh gave off a smell, a blend of her own scent and perfume, of memory and dream, of fantasy and nightmare, the smell of his mother lying in his bed when he was ill, the smell of the little pianist as it clung to his fingers, the smell of flesh and fur and faeces, a confection of desire and revulsion, a blend of all those things that he had never dared imagine and those which, imagining, had repelled him. And her breath was in his ear, the rasp of her breath, the muffled voice of her heartbeat; and she was whispering absurd and childish words, as one might to a nervous animal: ‘My lion, my strong lion. I’m not going to eat you. You mustn’t worry. It’ll be all right.’ As though the breath of her body didn’t frighten him, the lucid texture of her skin, the incontinence of her hands, as though all this didn’t terrify him. As though her breasts, soft and warm against his face, didn’t hold between them the warm smell of motherhood. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispered as she lay beneath him in the hot, still anonymity of his bedroom with the traffic mumbling in the street below. ‘It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.’ As though mere repetition would make it so.
She found some tissues in her handbag and wiped her belly. The room was hot, hot and airless. Their fragile, fragmentary unity was gone and they lay apart, slick with sweat, limned with guilt. He looked at her lying naked beside him. She was flesh again; for a few, treacherous moments she had been something else, something evanescent that he couldn’t now recall, but now she was mere flesh once more.
She lay on her back, her breasts slopping sideways under the insistence of gravity. When she spoke she directed her words to the ceiling. ‘It must seem a disappointment. Does it seem a disappointment? Anti-climax perhaps. That’s the right phrase, isn’t it? Apposite.’ She turned and kissed him chastely on the cheek. ‘I’ll go and wash.’
What is done cannot be undone, he thought. You can confess; you can ask forgiveness; you can expiate your sins; but you cannot undo anything. He thought of how her small tough hands had guided him knowingly; how she had whispered i
mprecations; how her hips had writhed, like the antics of a whore. None of that could be undone. ‘Your fish,’ she had whispered as she clasped him in her fist. ‘Your big, shiny fish.’ Another vocable from the Brewer family lexicon, no doubt. Doubtless Jack had a big, shiny fish. The thought thrilled him and appalled him. Fish, ichthys, pisces, pisser: an absurd concatenation of words. He had spent his life with words, with the texture of them, the precise intent, the significance. Another one floated up out of the wreckage: fornication – a tortured word. Fornix, an arch, a vault, the vaulted arch of a brothel no doubt, the arch of the legs, the crotch, the crux, which is the cross on which we all hang. Keep away from fornication, Saint Paul whispered to him. All other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body. The fluid guilt was manifested in him, in the sharp start of tears in his eyes, in the awful incontinent flood from his body. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are not your own property; you have been bought for a price.
He watched her roll off the bed and pad, plump and clumsy, across the room to the door – her pale, awkward buttocks with their dark dividing crease; her thick waist and loose thighs; the way she moved, which was hers alone and which, at that moment, repelled him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he called after her.
She looked back at him lying on the bed. ‘Forget it. For God’s sake don’t worry. The last thing I need is apology.’ There was an edge of anger in her tone.
‘What do you need?’
She laughed humourlessly. ‘Who knows? You, I suppose. The thought frightens you, doesn’t it?’ She turned away and went to the bathroom without waiting for him to answer.
9
The phone rang the next morning. He didn’t have to get to the Institute before eleven o’clock and he was at home doing little or nothing, just reading an article that he was reviewing for Papyrology Today, taking refuge in the quotidian. The phone gave its intrusive petulant sound that would never take no for an answer and he assumed it would be her. He picked up the receiver. ‘Madeleine?’
There was a silence on the other end. ‘Is this Father Leo Newman?’ A voice of limpid, crystalline tones, the tones of Oxford and the English College, the tones of the hierarchy. ‘Am I speaking to Father Leo Newman?’
He felt a small spurt of panic, something physical just below his diaphragm. He closed his eyes. ‘Yes, this is Leo Newman.’
‘I have Bishop Quentin on the line for you, Father.’
The voice left him to sweat in the stillness of the morning. After a while someone else came on the other end, the tones of Maynooth this time, urbane, jovial, threatening. ‘Leo, my dear, how are you?’ They’d had trouble tracking him down. They hadn’t been sure where he was. They were concerned, worried, anxious about one of their number who had strayed in the wilderness, less concerned over the ninety and nine who were safely in the sheep pen. ‘I think we ought to meet for a chat, Leo,’ the Bishop said. ‘To talk things over. I think you owe it to yourself, and to me.’
‘I’m waiting for a call from Jerusalem. I don’t know that I can get away.’
‘I think perhaps you ought to.’
Madeleine came round that afternoon. She had rung during the morning to fix a time. ‘Jack’s flight gets in this evening,’ she had said. ‘We can be together for a bit.’ But when she let herself into the flat her manner was hurried and distracted: things had gone wrong with her arrangements; Jack was due back earlier. She had telephoned the office to check and she had discovered that he had got a seat on an earlier flight, so she couldn’t stay long. ‘The best laid plans of mice and men …’ she said, divesting herself of coat and bag of shopping.
‘It’s “schemes”. The best laid schemes …’
‘Pedant. I’ll have to make up some story if I’m late, shopping I’d forgotten to do or something. Here, I’ve brought you a present.’
He watched as she unwrapped one of her packages. It contained different blends of tea – lapsang souchong, green gunpowder, absurd names like that.
She came up to him and wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest. ‘Am I forgiven?’ she asked. As though they were in that stuffy confessional once again and she was asking for absolution.
‘Forgiven for what?’
‘I was unkind yesterday.’
‘Were you?’
‘It was the first time. First times can be difficult.’
‘Can they? You sound as though there have been many.’ Was she practised in all this, he wondered – the hurried telephone calls, the assignations, the gifts? Did she know about it all?
She was very still, holding herself against him and not daring to move. ‘A few. Does it shock you?’
‘There’s not much that shocks me,’ he said. ‘Priests are remarkably unshockable. What would Jack do if he found out about us?’
‘Jack?’ She seemed surprised by the name. She looked up at him, her faintly furrowed brow with its scattering of pale freckles mere inches below his face. ‘He will eventually, won’t he? I mean, we can’t keep up this kind of deceit for ever. People get a sense of something being up. They know.’
‘Do they?’
‘Oh yes, assuredly they do.’
‘And then?’
She shrugged, releasing him from her arms, turning to the table and putting things in order, the things that she had brought with her. ‘He’ll probably be awfully understanding. He is, you know. It’s a dreadful word to use, but Jack is awfully nice. I suppose I should say decent. Very decent, very civilised, very English. He’d probably comfort me if he knew.’
The word know, that strange Biblical euphemism. Leo knew her, knew the smell of her and the taste, knew that imperfect concoction of flesh and fur that was her body; but with surprise he realised that he no longer knew the person within. Intimate physical knowledge had somehow chased away any previous understanding he had of her. What did he know of her life with her husband? What did he know of the secret life that was hers and his, the affective life that drives a marriage, the libido that drives a woman? What went on between the sheets? He noticed that her accent had become more accentuated as she spoke about her husband, as though in the act of praising him she was also distancing herself from his supposed Englishness, his decency. To go with the scent of exotic tea there was the pungent smell of hypocrisy.
‘Calder phoned me this morning,’ he told her, wanting to move away from such dangerous ground.
‘Calder?’
‘The people in Jerusalem. They want me back. I put them off for the moment, but I’ll have to go sooner or later.’
‘Have to?’
‘This papyrus. If I want to be involved.’
‘And do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘So you’ll abandon me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
She laughed, as though to diffuse the fear, as though to show that it was no more than a joke. ‘I must go now. I’ll give you a ring as soon as I can.’
He had kept his real news until last, until she was halfway to the door. ‘And I’ve been summoned to London,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’
She stopped. ‘Summoned?’
‘By my bishop.’
‘They can’t know about us.’
‘I think they feel I’m straying from the straight and narrow.’
‘And they’re trying to pull you back.’
‘Something like that. There’s the scroll too. Maybe they’ve heard about that.’
‘Why can’t they leave you alone?’ Her eyes seemed bright with tears, her composure fractured. ‘Why can’t they leave you to make your own decisions?’
‘They have their rights, don’t they?’
‘What in God’s name do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing. It’s their duty, that’s all. You can’t blame them.’
‘Meaning you can blame me?’
‘I’m not blaming anyone. I expected it sooner or later and I’ve got to face
up to it.’
‘What’ll you say to them? What’ll you say about us, I mean?’
‘I don’t know what I’ll say.’
‘When are you going?’
‘I told you. Tomorrow. At eleven.’
‘Tomorrow! Where will you stay?’
‘With the Jesuits at Farm Street. They’re good with apostates.’
‘Is that what you are?’
He shook his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know, Madeleine. I just don’t know.’
She watched him thoughtfully, brow puckered, lower lip gently bitten. He himself had bitten that lip and tasted its determination. ‘Leo,’ she asked, ‘do you still believe?’ The question was quite unexpected, quite shocking, in fact. Their relationship has been built on a shaky foundation of allusion and joke, not on a substantial discussion of matters of faith.
‘Believe?’
‘In God, in Christ, in any of what you are still wedded to. You know what I mean. That scroll. Me. Has all that blown everything away?’
He shrugged. ‘Belief doesn’t just evaporate.’
‘Doesn’t it? That’s exactly what it seems to do in my experience. Evaporate, like a lake or something drying up, leaving nothing behind but mud flats and a few dirty puddles and a musty smell of superstition. You remember that time I came to make my confession? Well that was almost my last moment of faith. I guess the lake had become a small pond but hadn’t yet degenerated into a puddle.’
‘So I let you down in your moment of need?’
‘Not at all. You gave me something new to believe in. And you haven’t answered my question.’
‘Perhaps that’s because I don’t know the answer.’
‘Can’t tell pond from puddle, is that it?’ She laughed, but it was one of her humourless laughs, a bitter thing. ‘We can’t go on like this, Leo,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘What alternative do we have?’
‘Oh, there’s an alternative all right. You leave the priesthood, I leave Jack.’
‘You couldn’t.’
