Garcia rings to ask if he should get Harness put down. He cannot get a clear answer from Mary Fisher, who is as inconsolable at Bobbo’s absence as the dog. Harness, says Garcia, is now disturbed, incontinent, uncontrollable in traffic, and has taken to snatching the food from Mary Fisher’s plate. Even the vet says there is nothing for him but merciful oblivion. What do I think?

  ‘I think you must do as the vet suggests,’ say I. I cannot have Harness eating the food from Mary Fisher’s plate. As she grows fat, I shall grow thin. That’s the way it is.

  Harness goes to the vet and does not return.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ Mary Fisher asks Garcia.

  ‘Of course I do!’ he says.

  ‘I used to,’ she says. ‘If only I could believe again. He was such a great consolation.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  FATHER FERGUSON LIVED IN the house next to his church, in a central area of the city where the new high-rises had not quite ousted the low stone brick buildings of the original town. He had been looking for a housekeeper for some time, but without success, for the house was large and cold and old and reputed to be haunted, and had no heating in winter or air-conditioning in summer. Father Ferguson did not like being too comfortable: he felt easier in his soul when slightly hungry, or too hot or too cold, or when he had toothache. He was a familiar sight in the city, a lean, white-haired, anguished figure, jogging to and from his church to the Mission in Bradwell Park, morning and evening. It was a distance of five miles.

  ‘There he goes!’ his parishioners would say. ‘Isn’t he a wonder! He has some odd notions for a priest, but a priest he is. Or else a saint!’

  He was thirty-five. His hair had turned white when he was twenty-nine, when he had been obliged to deliver a baby to a drug-addicted mother in a derelict house. The baby was stillborn. The mother rejoiced. He felt that the Devil was loose in the world.

  Now he worked amongst the people. He was not popular with his ecumenical superiors, for he not only dabbled in political matters, but was unpredictable in his attitudes generally. He had been known to say in public that mouths must be filled before souls could be fed. He would lay the blame for sin at the State’s door: he all but preached revolution while maintaining an almost absurd quietism in his personal affairs. He wanted the alcohol removed from the communion wine. He signed petitions which sought to outlaw nuclear warfare. His flock didn’t like him either, although they felt duty bound to admire him, because he recommended celibacy for the unmarried, and abstinence for the married if they had decided against children. His flock thought he was mad: now there were antibiotics for social diseases, and contraception — and if necessary abortion — to prevent the accidental birth of children, what was he going on about? The welfare agencies thought he was wicked, and hopelessly old fashioned. As well blame the moon for lunacy!

  Father Ferguson’s church was falling down: no one would help him put it back up. Not just the house but the church was said to be haunted. Push open the door on a lonely night and sounds of music and the scent of incense and glimpses of bright colour within could be heard, and smelled and seen. Outside in the new big city the sound of traffic rose, day and night, never stopping: here in the old church lingered a memory of that other little world, long ago, which formed the new one, and left its poetry, and its lingering customs to enrich it. People shivered and shook at the notion of a haunting that was divine, not diabolic. And in the house itself, they said, shadowy monks came and went, although certainly monks had never lived there.

  Father Ferguson himself had never encountered either the ghostly service in his church or the ghostly monks in his house, and was scathing about those who had.

  ‘I believe in God,’ he said, ‘not ghosts. To believe in ghosts is an insult to the Almighty’s creation!’

  A property developer wanted the land on which the church and house stood to build yet another high-rise office block. Father Ferguson’s masters, being in financial difficulties, would have liked the sale to go through, but Father Ferguson was obstinate. He was quoted in the local press as claiming that the Church was opting out of its responsibilities and abandoning the inner city to the Devil and the feminists (the property company was run by a woman) and turning its back upon the wretched of the world. Father Ferguson appeared to equate the Devil with capitalism, not communism, which was unfortunate. The matter reached the national press, and Father Ferguson made further headlines by suggesting that priests should be allowed to marry, that celibacy must be a matter of choice: that it was impossible to deal with God’s breeding, teeming world properly as a half-man. The phrase was his. ‘Half-Man.’

  ‘Father Ferguson,’ said his masters, ‘do we hear you right? You recommend marriage without sex to the sheep and marriage with sex to the shepherd? Is this not inconsistency?’

  ‘Not so inconsistent as Jesus,’ replied Father Ferguson, unabashed. ‘Blasting fig trees one day, turning cheeks the other.’

  Father Ferguson advertised weekly for a housekeeper. He needed one: he could not manage his clothes. He washed his shirts carefully but they did not come clean. He would rub the collar fabric thin, but still the dirt remained; he didn’t understand it. Whenever he opened the great creaky wardrobe that had been his mother’s, and a wedding present to her from her grandmother, and took out his trousers, there would be stains on them he could have sworn were not there the day before. Or perhaps he had put them away in a poor light, and taken them out in a strong one? Except the light in the house was never good. Once it had been surrounded by fields and flowers and trees, and the windows had let in more than enough; now the garages and the high-rises crowded in and sopped up God’s light, leaving only dimness and fumes behind.

  Sometimes he thought he was living in hell. The food in the refrigerator went bad. He did not understand it. Cold was supposed to preserve food. The inside of the cabinet was covered with a blackish, spotty mould. Perhaps he just left food in there for too long, forgetting the passage of time? He did not much appreciate or need food, but liked to have the odd square of cheese, or an egg for supper.

  When Molly Wishant applied for the job of housekeeper it seemed to Father Ferguson that his problem was at last solved. She was a woman like no other. She could not possibly be seen by his parishioners as a source of erotic excitement. She was strong, well-spoken and intelligent; she was escaping from nothing; and her reason for wanting the job — a desire to fill in time usefully while losing three stone, as a doctor had suggested she should — seemed to him unusual but acceptable. She would not become hysterical and claim the house was haunted. She was too sombre a person to chatter at breakfast time; she did not wear a gold cross around her neck, in mockery of Our Saviour’s death, as so many did. She had facial moles from which hairs sprouted, so presumably lacked vanity, and would not spend so much time in the bathroom, night or morning, as to inconvenience him. She would not run up the food bills. He did not think that the mere losing of weight would help the poor creature much: she would remain ungainly; but it was scarcely his business to point this out.

  ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ he asked.

  ‘I used to help out at Vickie’s house. You know, the pregnant girl with two children, and no husband, down at Bradwell Park.’

  ‘I can’t quite place her,’ he said. ‘There are so many like her.’

  ‘And will be more,’ said Molly Wishant, ‘if you go on telling them what you do.’

  ‘We are all God’s children,’ he said, startled.

  He hoped she did not feel the cold: that she would not waste the electric fires unnecessarily. She said she imagined her work would keep her warm. That was on the first day of her employment. She slept in one of the attic rooms, where plaster flaked from the ceiling whenever a lorry went by in the street below. The bed was wire mesh hung from an iron frame, and the mattress old, old horsehair.

  After a week Molly mentioned that Father Ferguson’s shirts needed replacing. Father Ferguson replied that they were only ten years old and when she said that was quite old, for a shirt, he said that his father’s had lasted twenty, so she agreed to make do. She took fabric from the bottom hems and patched underneath the arm. The priest’s collars were detachable; he had been left an extra dozen in an uncle’s will: they were lasting rather better than the shirts.

  ‘God looks after His own,’ said Father Ferguson.

  Presently she asked for soap and hot water to help her with the laundry, and he said that in the seminary in Italy in which he had been trained washing was done with cold stream water and without soap. Molly pointed out that the water there may well have been softer, but that the city water was hard; but she agreed to use those new detergents which worked in cold water as well as in hot.

  She investigated the stains on his trousers and found some kind of fungus life in the top of the wardrobe which exuded drops of sticky liquid from time to time; this she eradicated.

  She put 100-watt bulbs in the sockets instead of the 40-watt bulbs he had taken for granted, and the monk-like shadows were revealed for what they were: the long curtains in the hall flying up in the draught that came blustering down from the attic when the dining-room fire was lit, casting vague shapes on the upstairs gallery. Father. Ferguson worried about the expense of the stronger bulbs but she assured him the difference in price was minimal.

  He believed her. She inspired trust. She lost one stone in the first month she worked for him. She seemed to know what she was about. She was lonely and he was sorry for her.

  She would not clean his church. She laughed and said it would not be suitable for an unbeliever to do so. She said she didn’t believe in God, but she did believe in the Devil. She’d met him only recently, and had had closer contact with him than was pleasant. He thought he would rather deal with someone who acknowledged the Devil than with those many who professed to believe in God, but who saw Him only in anthropomorphic terms. That is, who trivialised Him.

  He told her about the rumours that the church was haunted, and she said no doubt the rumours had been put about by the property developers who wanted to buy the land.

  He came to think, in the space of six weeks or so, that she was precious: a pearl amongst women. For someone so large she moved silently. He hoped she would never leave. He began to tempt her with little morsels of food — at first squares of cheese, and apples, but then he would drop by the corner store and bring home jam doughnuts and apple turnovers. Not cheap; but the faster she lost weight the sooner she would go.

  He saw that perhaps life could be pleasant without being frivolous. He accepted a bottle of sherry as a gift from one of the parishioners — a woman who, he later discovered, had given out her three children, two born and one unborn, for adoption. They had gone to good Christian families, albeit in the Lebanon. He called Molly down from her attic to help him drink it. His deep eyes flashed with a softer fire, and hers glittered redly. Outside the juggernauts rumbled by, and china clinked and lamps trembled, as if in an earthquake. It was never quite dark or quiet in the house, no matter how ancient the spirits within it.

  ‘What was the woman’s name?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Vickie, I think,’ said Father Ferguson, and Molly raised her glass.

  ‘How much did she get for them?’ she asked.

  ‘Not even in Bradwell Park,’ said the Father, ‘do women sell their children for money!’

  ‘Then they should start,’ said Molly.

  They drank the entire bottle of sherry between them.

  ‘Jesus turned water to wine,’ said Molly. ‘He can’t have thought so badly of it.’

  ‘True,’ said Father Ferguson, and opened another bottle, which Molly happened to have by her. She wouldn’t have any herself, pointing out that she was on a diet, so he was obliged to drink it all himself.

  ‘Otherwise,’ said Molly, ‘it will go off.’

  Father Ferguson had recently received a letter from his bishop asking him not to talk to the press without prior reference to his superiors, and suggesting that he should consider seriously whether he was guilty of the sin of arrogance.

  ‘How can a man be humble and improve the world?’ he asked.

  ‘He can’t,’ she said, thus giving him permission to sin. ‘Anyway, what’s arrogance? It is a word. I am convinced; you are self-righteous; he is arrogant.’

  ‘How can a man stay celibate and understand his own nature?’

  ‘He can’t,’ she said, thus vindicating his frivolity.

  He looked at her speculatively. Her two rows of crude white temporary teeth glowed an invitation.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

  She seemed startled.

  ‘A civil marriage. Let them excommunicate me if they dare!’

  As he spoke he thought he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer of movement up in the gallery; the cowled shapes of men passing to and fro, but knew it could only be imagination, or the effects of alcohol, to which he was not accustomed.

  ‘Did you see anything up there?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a thing.’ But she did. ‘Only the guilty see ghosts,’ she added, which he feared might be true.

  She said she wouldn’t marry him; she couldn’t: she was married already, and so far as she was concerned marriage was once and once only and until death. As for anything else, any other way of arranging their lives to their mutual benefit, of increasing the funds of his self-knowledge, of making him a better priest, they would have to wait and see.

  It had not occurred to Father Ferguson that he might meet resistance. That the clergy should marry, should have carnal knowledge with the opposite sex it appeared was one thing. Whether it could marry, could find anyone to bed, was another. He began to see the complexities of life in the temporal world.

  ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that for a man such as myself to lose my virginity to a woman such as you could not be construed as an act of impulse, let alone carnal turpitude. It would be chastely considered and implemented: the union of such unlikely flesh that it could only imply the sharing of my soul with yours. A supreme sacrifice.’

  ‘You are very persuasive,’ she said, allowing herself to be persuaded. There was quite a flurry at this amongst the ghostly visitors upstairs but she stared at them boldly, and they evaporated, melting into nothingness as he led her to his room.

  Beside her in bed he felt warm and protected. He had the feeling that nothing of his had gone into her — which he had assumed would be the case in sexual congress — but that on the contrary something of her had gone into him.

  They had bacon and eggs for breakfast, and toast and marmalade and coffee. He did not lament her extravagance. He would have forsworn jogging in Bradwell Park, but thought this might cause comment.

  ‘You’re either very bad for me, or very good for me,’ he said to Molly. She put on three pounds in weight, abandoning her diet for his sake, and after that he said only, ‘You are very good for me.’

  He knew he had changed because when presently he took confession from a woman who had been using contraceptives and whose husband had left her, he did not equate the sin with the consequence.

  Usually in such circumstances he would say; ‘My child, your punishment has been on this earth, you are excused.’ Today he said briskly, ‘My child, I am sure our Heavenly Father would commend your good sense. You had the wit to know your husband would leave and took the responsibility of not bringing another mouth into the world for the State to feed. Peace be with you!’

  And to a woman with five children, two subnormal, whose husband was a known drunkard, and violent, and insistent on his marital rights, he actually recommended a visit to the family planning clinic, forgetting his usual dictum of hard cases making bad law, a concept which worked as well in spiritual matters as in worldly ones.

  He wanted to make an issue of it, of course. That was in his nature. He wanted to proclaim to the world that he was no longer a Half-Man; to claim his right to have intercourse with his housekeeper if he so decided. But Molly didn’t want that.

  ‘They’ll only take photographs,’ she said. ‘I hate being photographed.’

  Well, he could understand her feelings.

  In the third month Molly bought him new shirts and trousers out of parish funds — he had underspent for years on his personal needs. They shared Molly’s room, and when it was cold turned on all three bars of the electric heater. He began to understand, as he waited for night to fall and bedtime to come, why his flock was so insistent upon its sexual pleasures.

  Molly said one night in the fourth month that the problem down in the western suburbs was not sex, which everyone knew was a sacrament, but love. Had he looked at the bookstalls lately? Did he understand that practically all the women who could read were buying romantic fiction? What hope did they have of ever reaching emotional maturity, let alone of gaining any kind of moral sense, if they read such rubbish?

  ‘Worldly love is a shadow of the divine,’ said Father Ferguson. ‘I can hardly believe it is as dangerous as you say.’

  But he remembered what she said and at his next press conference — he had held them weekly since he received his bishop’s letter begging prudence — he remarked that since these days the purveyors of fiction (in the absence of any moral guidance from a de-vitalised Church, and they knew his views on that) were the most powerful moral force in the land, they should be brought under Church control. Writers themselves, rather than their works, should be vetted for their sense of social responsibility. The writer would then have carte blanche to write what he or she wished. It was not a matter of censorship, but of self-censorship.

  There was a gratifying uproar, and much protest from various writers’ organisations, which made Father Ferguson feel he was really on to something. When you prodded the body politic and it squealed there was something nasty down there somewhere. But then his superiors rebuked him for interfering in matters which were nothing to do with the Church, and he let the whole question drop.