The devils diary, p.21
The Devil's Diary, page 21
As a young priest in a world of secular indifference he often felt grateful for the legacy his teacher had bequeathed him. It was not until he had begun discussing morality and religion with Dr Sharma that he realised that the valley of reason was a valley of conflicting echoes. Perhaps he lacked his professor’s erudition or even Dr Sharma’s oriental subtlety. Whatever the cause, he soon came to realise that the enclosed system of thought in which he had been trained survived in its pristine simplicity only because it was enclosed. It was a hermitage behind high walls with a life that achieved harmony and unity by ignoring the shouting and the rumpus from the Tower of Babel outside.
Dr Sharma seemed well read in eastern and western philosophies. She was not overbearing or disputatious. She listened to what he had to say and now and again asked a question. When he answered, she did not seek to contradict. She merely thought for a moment and then asked another question. He sensed that through him she was searching for a truth that had hitherto eluded her. He felt flattered. He considered it his duty as a priest to communicate his religious experience and the framework of thought in which it existed. After a while she seemed to lose interest, and they talked about more personal and worldly things. Then one evening, as he sat alone in his room, he began to regret having talked to her. He had said too much. He had said so much that all that remained to be said was that he now knew nothing. The Tower of Babel was no longer outside the walls. It was a pandemonium inside his head.
He lay back on the sofa and closed his eyes. It seemed to him that Canon Hackler had entered the room on tiptoe and was standing beside him with his hat pulled down over his jug ears.
‘So you’ve decided to leave us?’ he said gravely.
‘I’m giving up, I’m no longer able to function as a priest.’
‘Ah, cherchez la femme,’ the canon smiled omnisciently.
‘No.’
‘It must be a woman, it always is.’
‘Not this time.’
‘Was it the German girl who died? Depression and despair after unbearable grief perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘Then it must be a failure to pray.’
‘No, no. Prayer was my pillar of cloud by day as study was my pillar of fire by night.’
‘Too much study then. I’ve always said that theology is to priests what ornithology is to birds.’
‘It is simply that I took my priesthood seriously. I wanted to be a priest twenty-four hours a day.’
‘Tu es sacerdos in aeternum.’
‘Tu es Canon Bingo in aeternum. If I could be a priest, a real priest, just for one day, I’d die a happy man.’
‘We could pray together, the two of us. We could go on retreat, give God a chance. You believe in God?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘But what?’
‘His universe is a cold and mechanistic place and life has little to do with love, either earthly or heavenly. The long night of life is loveless.’
‘What on earth is the matter with you, Jerry?’
‘There’s nothing the matter with me. I know what you’ll all say after I leave: “Where did he go wrong? Where did we go wrong? Was he fond of a drop? Did he have a hidden weakness for women?” The same old post-mortem, or is it a vivisection? Well, it’s simpler and less sensational than you all imagine. It won’t make the headlines, it won’t even make good sacristy gossip. All I want is to sink back into God’s anonymous congregation. I want to kneel at the back of the church and let Canon Bingo, Monsignor Disco and Bishop Monopoly do the incensing. I’m sick, sick, sick, I tell you. Sick of sham.’
‘Jerry, you are sick. You need a rest. Why don’t you go away for a month? To a monastery or even the seaside. A supply is no problem this time of year. Don’t worry about a thing, just leave the arrangements to me.’
He went to the north window again and looked down on the Glebe, a place of many colours and multifarious activity. More tents had sprung up at the far end. Men and women were hurrying here and there. From a grassy knowe a solitary rabbit surveyed the scene. On a squally October day two years ago, just after he had come back from London, he stood at this window gazing at the same patch of ground. The wind was making waves in the aftergrass and wrinkling the surface of the sea. Suddenly it lifted a haycock sky-high. The haycock disintegrated in the air and the wind shook it out over the grey and indifferent water. It was the most startling thing he had ever seen. Hay into hay dust before his very eyes.
‘The glen is unpossessable,’ he told himself. ‘It is as alien and elusive as a dream. Hugo’s island and the Termon Stone are dreams. So is my unlived and unrealised life. The dream is not my own. To me it seems like Hugo’s and even that is only a reflection of yet another more impenetrable dream.’
He went out to the hallway and rang Canon Hackler who greeted him with bluff self-confidence.
‘Don’t say a word. I know why you’re ringing. You’ve decided at last to go for bingo.’
Father Jerry hesitated. ‘I’m really ringing about my holiday.’
‘I thought you said you weren’t having any this year.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. I feel a bit off-colour, I need a break.’
‘When were you thinking of going?’
‘I’d like to go next week. I’ll organise a supply before Sunday.’
‘I thought you looked drawn last time I saw you. What you need is three square meals a day. All this vegetarianism can’t be doing you any good. You’ve made your body your sworn enemy. You need to relax. Go to the seaside, it will be quiet now. Put up at a comfortable hotel where the food is good. Eat a solid breakfast and a hearty lunch and, remember, a big juicy steak for dinner. You’ll come back like a lion, we won’t be able to keep up with you.’
‘You’re a sensible man, Canon,’ he said, ringing off.
The truth was that he needed more than a holiday. He needed to escape from staleness and sameness, from the tedium of knowing in the morning the conformation of the evening. He wished to be shocked into a new order of existence, into a life of fulfilment with the complexity and texture that come from the daily ebb and flow of truly felt relationships. His bishop and parish priest could quote him texts to prove that the union he yearned for was not to be found on earth. They would not know that his need was in his body, a need for spring, new growth and the joy of the never-before-experienced. It was a need that could not be satisfied.
He recalled a summer day in the heart of the country with heat coming up out of the ground. He was walking along a straight lane with a high hedge on each side when out of a gateway came a small curly-headed girl, barely old enough to toddle. Haltingly, she came towards him with a little switch in one hand, small and slightly bow-legged between the hedges. Her light brown hair could have been that of his dead sister Carmel. It was so wonderful to see her alive and smiling in the quiet, dusty lane. He bent over her and took her upraised hand. Her mother, a stocky, frumpish woman, came running out of the gateway.
‘Oh, there you are, thank heavens.’ She dragged the reluctant girl away.
Neither the bishop nor the canon would understand the profound effect that the incident had had on him, or why he would never forget the straight, grey lane stretching uncompromisingly ahead. Would he find the strength to continue to walk that lane without looking over his shoulder or gazing into the mysterious gateways on either side?
A bell began tolling in the village with a warm vibrancy he had not heard before. In a field between the parochial house and the Glebe a man stopped digging and took off his cap to say the Angelus. Father Jerry hurried to the village where a small group of men and women had gathered in the churchyard. McDaid came out of the belfry, smiling broadly.
‘She’s a lovely bell, and a pleasure to ring,’ he said.
‘It’s a surprise to mark your second anniversary here,’ an old man explained.
‘The parish council wanted to give you a present. We collected the money and kept it a secret among ourselves,’ McDaid added.
‘You bought a new bell against my wishes.’
‘We paid good money for it, we collected from every house. The parish council was unanimous. There was a vote, the decision was arrived at democratically.’
Though he was angry, he saw the puzzlement in their faces and the triumph in McDaid’s blue eyes.
‘I can see you don’t think much of democracy, Father,’ McDaid said.
‘Did Canon Hackler know about this?’
‘Canon Hackler keeps his ear to the ground, he knows everything,’ one of the women said.
‘You should have told me. As a priest I can only forgive you. As a man I am less than happy.’
‘Now we’ll have the Angelus every noon and evening again. Five hundred people will pray twice a day. A thousand prayers. It can only do good,’ McDaid smiled.
Father Jerry hurried away, leaving them to stare at one another in the windswept churchyard. As he walked back to the parochial house, he knew that in showing anger he had done himself less than justice. He felt tired and dispirited, unable to think. For the remainder of the afternoon he sat by the window of the study looking blankly across the fields at the roofs of the village houses.
The dry, brittle days of autumn would pass into winter. Rain and wind would bleach the grass, and the grey boulders on the hillsides would turn into ugly barnacles on the hull of a grounded cargo vessel. Mist would come billowing in from the sea to shroud the mountains before thickening into drizzle and cold rain. The glen would shrink into a hard, ice-bound trough, and night would come down at three o’clock in the afternoon. He was forty-four, still in the mellow September of his life, yet in his heart it was the end of December with the black entrails of the year laid bare.
He recalled an April day in the mountains just before Hugo came back to the glen. He was walking northwards to Glencrow, knee-deep in frost-burnt heather, aware of nothing but the clear sky above and the hard, sharp breeze on his face. Among the roots of the withered heather young grass was peeping, single blades, beautifully green, bright and slender like new corn. He stooped and plucked one blade of ‘heather braird’, twirling it in his fingers, as he held it up to the breeze. For a moment his whole body glowed with exaltation. The lean sheep would push through the sapless heather and feed on the single blades of new grass underneath. To satisfy their hunger and survive till summer they would search diligently and travel far each day, but they would survive because even in this barren land there was still sustenance for anyone with the desire to find it.
At six the bell rang again and he counted the strokes without moving from his seat by the window. They never varied: three, three, three, followed by nine, making eighteen in all. The bell sounded from an outer world, a voice of health, wholeness and continuity. It was not his bell. He’d had no say in the ordering or making of it. It had been hung and rung against his wishes. As he listened to its rounded tone, he realised how little depended on him. The day-to-day life of the parish went on while he was absent fighting demons from another place and time.
He got up to answer the telephone in the hall, half-expecting to hear Hugo’s subversive laughter. It turned out to be the bishop. He spoke softly, almost languidly, like an aristocratic sybarite after a good dinner at his club.
‘How are you keeping, my dear Jerry.’
‘I’ve never felt better, I’m pleased to say.’
‘You go from strength to strength, I always knew you would. I’ve got something to tell you. Yet another opportunity has arisen. I’ve had to make some changes and I thought it wise to remember you. I’m transferring you to Rathmallow next month. Canon Canty is parish priest there. A live wire. You’re certain to work well together.’
‘I’m happy here. I don’t think I’m ready for a change.’
For a moment the line went taut with silence.
‘Rathmallow is a good-sized town,’ the bishop continued blithely. ‘It will help to keep your mind off country matters.’
‘Country matters?’
‘I can’t help feeling that you care a shade too deeply about the countryside. In Rathmallow you’ll have other battles to keep you occupied.’
‘I never expected to remain in Glenkeel for ever but I had imagined that when I moved it would be to serve in another country parish.’
‘You mustn’t be so self-effacing, dear Jerry. The future is to be found in the town. You should look at life as a ladder. For you Rathmallow is the next rung up. You must come to see me soon. There is much to discuss. I’m determined to ensure that you succeed.’
Father Jerry put down the receiver. What the bishop did not understand he could not be made to understand. He was all drive and will; and the will, it willeth every day. He remembered his father and the care he lavished on his patients, even those who were too poor to pay his fee.
‘Would you like to be a doctor?’ he once asked on one of their walks in the mountains.
‘No, a priest,’ he’d replied without hesitation.
‘Not enough stress,’ his father advised. ‘You’re too sensitive to take on a life behind the lines. Do something that is not in your nature. If you flee far enough from yourself in your youth, you will have some chance of finding yourself in middle age. Now, the priesthood is the right job for Hugo. He’s coarse-grained and selfish. It might have a refining effect on him.’
‘What should I do then?’
‘Do something that no one else has done before.’
He went into his study and ran his eye along the packed shelves of the bookcase. ‘Don’t neglect your body, it’s a machine,’ his father had said. ‘And don’t neglect your mind, it’s a system of rivers that will silt up if it isn’t dredged regularly. Good books are great dredgers. A man who reads one good book a week will never have a stagnant oxbow lake in his head.’ His books had lost their potency. Now all the books in the Bodleian would not dredge the stagnant oxbow lake in his mind.
He went to the cupboard under the stairs and from the single shelf took down a box of cartridges that he’d bought for a clay-pigeon shoot and never opened. To his surprise the seal was broken and two of the cartridges were missing. He picked up his father’s shotgun and found it already loaded. Slowly, he turned it over in his hands. The stock was cracked and the foresight scratched from the time his father had dropped it accidentally from a cliff-top. It was strange to find it loaded. He wondered if he had dreamt it all before.
He carried the gun upstairs and stripped to his vest and underpants. Now the cloth was hanging up in the wardrobe, and, as Hugo had put it, he looked like any normal man. He took a poker from the fireplace and sat on the bed with two pillows to his back. He put the poker through the trigger-guard so that it rested in the curve of the first trigger, and he kept it in place with the toes of both feet. When he bent forward to put the muzzle to his mouth, he found the position too uncomfortable to maintain for long, and he wasn’t yet quite ready to push the poker away from him with both feet. He had expected confusion and perturbation. His hands were steady and his mind was calm. It seemed to him that he knew absolutely nothing, or alternatively that there was nothing to know. The hallowed practice of a lifetime asserted itself; he began repeating a favourite prayer: Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea, quem timebo … Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea, quem timebo … Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea, quem timebo … Dominus
A Note on the Author
PATRICK MCGINLEY was born in Donegal in 1937 and was educated at Galway University. He spent four years teaching in Ireland before taking up a career in publishing in London. He now lives in Kent with his family but regularly returns to Donegal in the Irish Midlands.
Discover books by Patrick McGinley published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/PatrickMcGinley
Foggage
Goosefoot
The Devil’s Diary
The Lost Soldier’s Song
The Red Men
The Trick of the Ga Bolga
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1988 by Jonathan Cape Ltd
Copyright © 1988Patrick McGinley
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ISBN: 9781448209521
eISBN: 9781448209538
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Patrick McGinley, The Devil's Diary
