by Simon Mawer
‘Of course I could. I think maybe it’s you that couldn’t.’
He ignored the barb. ‘What about the children?’
‘I can see the children during the holidays. That’s almost all I do anyway.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Because it’s dead simple, Leo,’ she replied, and the faint touch of her accent was sharpened by emotion. ‘The children take second place. Does that sound dreadful? But it’s true. Underneath it all there’s you, and there’s only you. That’s what love means.’
‘I thought love was selfless.’
‘That just shows where you are wrong, you poor deluded fool. Love is the most selfish thing in the world. That’s why the Church still demands celibacy.’ She smiled at him and shook her head sorrowfully. ‘You don’t want this, do you, Leo? You don’t want this to go any further.’
Leo breathed. He was startled by the difficulty, the physical effort required. As though he had lost the knack. He breathed deeply and watched her watching him, and he felt that in some way, absurdly, his new knowledge of her made her less accessible, less familiar. She was no longer a friend, a companion, someone with whom he could share his amusement. She was an unknown territory into which he had intruded, an island of conceit and concern. He had no reference points, no landmarks, nothing to guide him in this confused place of desire and revulsion. Love, he understood, was a Janus emotion. He loved her and loathed her at one and the same time. ‘Can’t we step back,’ he asked absurdly. ‘Can’t we go back to where we were?’
But there is no going back, there is no undoing. He knew that without her having to say it for him. You cannot unremember, you cannot unravel the warp and weft of experience. You cannot unbury your dead. He knew that well enough, knew it even as she laughed derisively at his idea. ‘Is that really what you’d like?’
‘It’s not a matter of what I’d like,’ he said.
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s a matter of what I am. Maybe I’m crippled, perhaps that’s it. Damaged by a lifetime of celibacy. Maybe some part of you atrophies. Love of one particular person is a very different thing to manage than love of humanity in general.’
‘But I don’t think you do love humanity in general. I think you rather despise humanity. I think that over the years you have learned to love only Leo Newman, that’s the trouble. And trying to love Madeleine Brewer is a bit of a shock.’ Her eyes were sharp and bright, and her smile sat awkwardly on her face, as though it might suddenly slide off and fall to the floor. ‘Leo Newman,’ she said, ‘do you love me as I love you?’ Her words had a strange echo about them, a sense of ritual. She might have been quoting from an obscure liturgy with which he was only half familiar.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know how you love me.’
That little laugh had once intrigued him. ‘That’s always been the way. That has always been the whole problem between a man and a woman. No one ever does know. You just muddle along and hope, and every now and again you have the fleeting illusion that you do know, that you both love each other in the same way and to the same extent.’ She came over to him and put her hands up to his shoulders and reached up on tiptoe to kiss him, very softly, on the lips. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow if you like.’
‘Take me?’
‘Yes, take you. To the airport. Can’t I drive you to the airport?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose you can.’
‘I’ll come round first thing.’
She kissed him again. He tasted the wetness of her lips and the bitterness of her saliva, and felt the flagrant intimacy of her tongue inside his mouth. And then she had gone, and he could hear her shoes clipping down the stairs.
10
He had barely dressed when she arrived next morning. She came in announced only by the sound of her key in the door, as though the place were hers as much as his, as though she belonged. A banal greeting. A kiss on the cheek.
‘You’re early.’
She shrugged. ‘I thought I’d get here in good time. I guessed the condemned man would be up bright and early.’
‘Is that what I am?’
‘Aren’t you about to face the Inquisition?’
‘The Inquisition, what’s left of it, is here in Rome. I’m just going to speak to my bishop.’
‘But it’s only the beginning, isn’t it? The beginning of a long and complicated process. Auto-da-fé, isn’t that what it is?’ Opening the window she climbed out on to the terrace. She made the same little gasp as she emerged into the view, the same sound that she had made when they had first looked the place over together – mere weeks ago in measured time but an aeon, a light-year, infinity in any other dimension. She stood at the parapet with her back to him, like a passenger at the taffrail of a ship looking out over the pitching, tossing ocean. The breeze caught her hair and threw it about, so that she put up a hand to control it. He could see cords of tendon beneath the pearly skin of her hand, and the thin lines of veins as blue as smoke. ‘You can see right through the lantern on Saint Peter’s,’ she said. ‘Have you noticed that? You can see the sky through the lights.’
‘That’s exactly where the sun is setting at the moment. It shines right through just as it goes down. I suppose that’s just for one or two days in the year.’
‘Maybe that means something.’
‘What? What on earth could it mean?’
She stood looking at the view. Perhaps she was trying to picture this sunset behind the lantern, shards of light throwing the delicate structure into silhouette, the flare seeming to consume the stonework for those few moments. Then she turned round and confronted him across the small terracotta strip of terrace. ‘We have plenty of time before we need to go,’ she said. ‘I came early on purpose, don’t you realise that?’
‘On purpose?’
‘Don’t be naïive,’ she said, and went inside, leaving him standing there with the whole city circling round him, the clouds cascading across a spring sky above his head, starlings surging in strange and convolute arabesques across the blue, the domes and towers turning round like parts of some great mechanism, pieces of machinery, cogs and cams and wheels in a great piece of mediaeval apparatus. He stood without moving. He heard the sounds of the day coming up to him, the groaning of this machine, the roar of traffic, the noise of people, someone calling from across a street, a door closing. And Madeleine was inside, waiting.
By the time they drove to the airport the sky was covered by broken cloud and there were fat spots of rain on the tarmac. She drove with dangerous distraction, talking all the time of matters of family, matters of common interest, as though there was nothing between the two of them and they had not shared the bittersweet flesh of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; as though a moment’s fleeting ecstasy had never been theirs. ‘Jack’s back in London next week.’ That kind of thing. ‘And the girls, oh, they don’t get back for the holidays until after that. They’ll go to their grandparents for a few days first. In Surrey, that is. Jack’s parents, of course.’
But in the anonymous shadows of the multi-storey car park her mood changed. She turned to him and clung to his hands and she looked bewildered, like the survivor of an earthquake picking over the wreckage, the fragments of a ruined life. ‘I love you, Leo,’ she whispered, and her hands clung to his as though to life itself. They were closer than in any confessional, barricaded from the prying world, shuttered together with only their thoughts. Passengers came and went. Cars cruised by in the shadows. ‘Do you love me now? Do you?’
‘Of course I do. I showed you.’
‘You don’t. You don’t even understand. I love you.’
‘Of course I understand.’
‘You don’t,’ she whispered. ‘You are just like in the confessional. You don’t have the faintest idea. But I can’t go on like this. You never say anything. You’re so bloody bound up. Costive.’ She giggled. It was a strange, uncertain sound, the sound of something fracturing inside.
‘I’m sorry––’
She shook her head as though in disbelief. ‘Don’t apologise. For God’s sake don’t apologise.’
They got out of the car. There was a silent walk along perspex tunnels, past advertisements for expensive shoes and bottles of perfume with curious, organic shapes. She had set her face against the future like someone confronting a blizzard. She was almost ugly like that, her sharp and luminous expression worn down by the elements. He wondered what she was feeling, what currents lay behind her distant expression, her distracted manner. He had never known this paradox, the sense of distance that intimacy brings with it, a sensation that the same shared things had different meanings for the two of them, the same words held different significance. They picked up his ticket at the airline desk and walked aimlessly amongst the crowd for a few minutes. The departures hall was as wide and impersonal as a railway station. ‘It’ll be a relief to get away, won’t it?’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly. It’s just two days. Less. Less than two days.’
‘And when you come back?’
‘We’ll see.’
She nodded, as though she already knew. At the departure gate she held his hands and raised herself on her toes to kiss him chastely on the cheek. Each action, each gesture seemed to carry with it a ritual significance that he couldn’t fathom. He let go her hands and turned away and went through gates to passport control. There was a security alert on. Had he packed this bag himself? they asked. He had. Had anyone tampered with it since he had closed it? They hadn’t. Had it been out of his sight since he had packed it? Would he mind opening it …?
She had given him a photograph. She had brought it with her to the flat that morning and he had had to open his case and pack the thing away. Now it lay there amongst his shirts and underpants like a votive object, a quiet, composed portrait framed in silver. Leo looked back for a moment and saw the same face watching from the other side of the glass partition, from beyond the X-ray machine, from the other side of the Styx. She waved, like someone bidding farewell to a lost soul. Then the security guard indicated that he could go, and he was through into the departure lounge and he couldn’t see her any more.
On the flight to London he was a figure in grey amongst the tourists, a solitary figure in grey amidst the coloured interlacing of the rest of the world. Picture him there, crammed between a nodding, smiling Japanese and a middle-aged American in a button-down shirt and Nike trainers. ‘I’m from Rome,’ the American kept saying to people. ‘Can you imagine that? Rome, Georgia, mind you. Not Rome, Italy.’ Picture Leo sitting there smiling and agreeing with his travelling companion and trying not to listen. He is at a turning point in his life: more than just a turning point, a veritable multiple intersection. In Jerusalem they are beginning to open the Judas papyrus; in Rome (Italy, not Georgia) Madeleine is awaiting his return; in London his bishop is awaiting his arrival. He sits there uncomfortably, between the sacred and the profane, between the devil and the deep, between the past and the present. And he looks quite relaxed and normal, almost composed in fact. Within there is turmoil, and a welling sense of claustrophobic panic; outside there is only the patient face of the cleric. Within he essays a brief prayer, rather in the manner of a child to see if there is anyone there to take his call; outside he smiles at an account of Rome, Georgia, Floyd County as a matter of fact, have you ever been there, Pastor? Within he sees Madeleine lying naked before him; outside he thanks the stewardess profusely and accepts her offer of The Times. Within he wonders what he has wondered for much of his life but has rarely allowed conscious space to: is there a being, transcendent or immanent – either will do – that one might call God (or Dio, or Allah, or Yahweh, or Bog if it comes to that), and if there is such a being, does he (He?) care one jot or tittle for the spiritual or physical life of this speck of dust crammed into tourist class on an Alitalia flight to London, Heathrow? He reads his breviary, possibly for the very last time. His question remains unanswered, but his body (embarrassingly: he has to shift in his seat to make things comfortable again) answers all too readily to the persistent vision of Madeleine, which exists in a separate but simultaneous part of his mind and has by now opened its legs. The sight shocks him again in retrospect, just as it had shocked him in hot and fetid reality, for he had never imagined it like that, never that gaping wound, that stigma that women bear, and all that tangled hair. ‘Priests are fairly unshockable,’ he had told her. But it wasn’t so.
Only on the train from the airport did he open the newspaper that he had been given. He leafed through the pages in search of distraction. There were the usual stories, the usual stalled Middle East peace initiative, the usual floods, the usual political scandals. And there on an inside page was the first hint of a different disaster, a different catastrophe:
ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND QUESTIONS CRUCIFIXION STORY
There was little substance. He could hear Goldstaub’s voice behind the words, his superlatives mixed with his evasions. While work proceeds on the painstaking task of opening the scroll, the story finished, Church sources are said not to be impressed by claims that may run contrary to the gospel account.
Apparently the Gospel of Judas was in the public domain. That was how Goldstaub would have put it.
Leo’s interview with the bishop was good-mannered on the surface, but beneath there were undercurrents of acrimony and fear. ‘Did you seen that article in yesterday’s Times?’ the man asked.
‘I’ve read it. They were all talking about it at Farm Street.’
‘They’re calling it the Gospel of Judas. Aren’t you tied up with the thing?’
‘I’ve been over to see the scroll,’ Leo admitted.
‘And what did you think?’
‘It’s very early, possibly first century.’
‘But so are the gospels, for God’s sake. Why should we give any greater credence to this thing? The Gospel of Judas. I ask you. Can it really be what it claims?’
Leo shrugged. ‘It’s pretty convincing.’
The bishop shook his head. ‘Things are bad enough as it is, without some priest calling the whole story of Christ into question. You know what I think? I think all this’ll just blow over, and you’ll be left looking a bloody fool.’
The accusation rankled. ‘It’s one of the most sensational finds in the whole history of New Testament studies. Whatever it turns out to be, even if it’s second century and a piece of anti-Christian propaganda, it’s a sensation.’
‘And if it isn’t?’
‘Isn’t what?’
There was a spurt of anger, a sudden, electric hint of fear. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Leo. If it turns out to be first century and what it claims to be – an eyewitness account, a contemporary account of the life of Christ by someone outside the gospel tradition. What then?’
‘The Church is going to have a lot of explaining to do.’
The bishop shook his head. ‘It does no good to explore the Faith too minutely, Leo. It isn’t that the Faith is not true, even factually true if you like, but surely it is not susceptible to the methods of science. One man’s hallucination is another man’s transfiguration. Who’s to say which is the true account?’ He attempted a smile. He was a genial fellow really, popular with the press who could always rely on him for the smart smack of common sense. ‘And will anyone believe yours?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘There’s been talk about you, you know that? Quite apart from this Judas thing, there’s been talk. It’s bound to affect how people view what you say.’
‘Talk?’
‘You moved out of the Institute, didn’t you?’
‘Is that against Canon Law?’
‘Of course it’s not. Don’t be contentious. But there’s talk of a particular friendship. Particular friendships are dangerous things, Leo. You know that. An English couple. A diplomat and his wife.’
He had expected something, of course, but still he felt himself flush. ‘Oh for God’s sake!�
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‘I have to tell you that their reputation goes before them.’
‘Their what? The Brewers are a respectable married couple. Mrs Brewer is a Catholic.’
‘Lapsed, I understand. Not that there’s anything wrong with lapsed. Half my congregation is lapsed these days. But I believe that when they were in Washington she was involved in––’
‘This is a disgrace.’ Fury. A kind of fury, something that was visceral more than intellectual like a tumour lodged just below the diaphragm and sending its fragments throughout the body.
‘Rumours, of course. Only rumours. But still. There were those in the Foreign Office––’
‘How can you deal in this kind of filth?’
‘—who were concerned to post her husband away—’
‘I’m in love with her,’ Leo said. He spoke quietly, but the fury was just below the surface. ‘You are talking about a woman that I love.’
The bishop was silent. They could hear the tapping of a keyboard in the office next door. ‘Leo, I strongly advise you to take a long rest,’ he said at last. ‘For your own spiritual well-being. I suggest somewhere that is truly holy. The Trappists perhaps—’
‘No.’
‘Or the Benedictines if you want something a little less demanding. Somewhere where there is no argument and no debate, but only the plain certainty of the eternal truth of God. You need time for reflection. Do you want me to get in touch with an old friend of mine at Subiaco?’
‘No.’
The bishop shrugged helplessly. He glanced round his dull bachelor’s room as though somewhere he might find a silver lining. ‘At least it’s not choirboys. I couldn’t take choirboys. Not again.’ The conversation spluttered on, the two men edging round issues of faith and love like dogs circling round a disputed bone. There was talk of suspension from priestly duties, of laicisation, of apostasy. ‘Maybe we should say a prayer together,’ he suggested finally. Prayer seemed to be the last resort, a sign of desperation.
After leaving the bishop’s rooms Leo went into the cathedral. He went past the exhortations to contribute to the upkeep of the place, past the programme of services, the notices about concerts of sacred music, the rack of books, the rack of pamphlets, the thermometer that showed the health of the roof fund. He went into the purple shadows of the place with their faint hint of incense, their sense of the numinous. There were people in the cathedral, a few tourists wandering round, but mostly worshippers just sitting in the pews or kneeling in prayer – surrendering in their own way to the broken, pinned figure hanging in the air above their heads. Someone began to play the organ. The sound drifted up into the shadows of the vault as though passing through the very bones of the building, making the whole place shudder in protest. Leo felt at the end of so many things: his faith, his vocation, his tether. He had exhausted prayer. Now he stood at the back of the central nave looking up at the great Christ figure hanging in the shadows over the crossing, and he was Judas. He knew all the pain of betrayal, how compelling it was, how necessary. Betrayal stemmed from belief, that was its compulsion. It stemmed from belief and conviction and it carried with it the certainty of knowledge.
