F. Cottam - Dark Echo

I couldn’t have been that unconvincing in bed because Rebecca, my college sweetheart, came to see me.

‘Have you never admired a priest?’

She pondered this. ‘The one in The Exorcist . He was cool. Sort of.’

She had on red lipstick and a clingy dress in black fabric and she wore a push-up bra. She had sprayed or dabbed her skin with Shalimar perfume. She smelled delicious.

‘Father Merrin.’

She shook her head. ‘The other one. The young, flawed guy.’

‘The whisky priest.’

‘Him. He was sort of cool.’

‘He didn’t really believe.’

‘That was what was cool about him.’

She brought with her a bag of provisions.

‘This isn’t a prison visit, Rebecca.’

‘That’s why I didn’t bake you a cake with a file in it. Why are you smiling?’

‘The idea of you baking any sort of cake.’

The bag was filled with temptations assembled to coax me out. She’d brought me an envelope of pictures of the two of us taken on a weekend in Brighton. She’d brought me an assortment of CDs. Van Morrison, Everything But The Girl, Prefab Sprout. Maybe she was just getting rid of them. ‘Wimp rock’ had always been her description of my taste in music. Most poignantly, she brought my football boots, bound together by their laces. I’d played every Sunday for a scratch team on Regent’s Park and would greatly miss that ritual. I was missing it already. The seminary overlooked the sea from its hill on the remote and craggy coast of Northumberland. It was a Jesuit citadel built when Queen Victoria was young. I’d been there six weeks. I missed everything.

Rebecca, perfumed, smelled edible.

‘Paddy McAloon trained for the priesthood.’

‘Who?’

I gestured at one of the CDs she’d brought me. Steve McQueen . ‘He’s the singer in Prefab Sprout. He writes all their songs.’

‘Is that your game plan, Martin? Train for the priesthood and become a rock star?’

The only time I’d ever had a game plan in my life was when I’d formulated one for beating Winston Cory. It had put me on my arse with my nose broken. ‘I’m not rock star material.’

‘You’re far too handsome to be a priest.’

‘God might disagree with you.’

She shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve come all the way to fucking Northumberland,’ she said. She started to put the stuff back into her bag. Her pictures. My boots. I hadn’t cleaned them properly after my last game and Rebecca hadn’t bothered either before bringing them. The familiar Regent’s Park football pitch odour of soil and dog shit clung to the studs. She dropped a snapshot on to the floor and snatched it up again and pushed strands of fallen hair away from her face. ‘Such a fucking waste.’

I lasted nineteen months. I endured in that time no great crisis of faith. The other novices were bright and amenable and good. Some of them were profoundly good. These privileged few, the rest of us felt privileged to be among. From them, I learned what it was to live in a state of grace. I encountered no closet Nazis and no one who thought the priesthood a secure route to a secret future of child molestation. The black propaganda attached to the organised Church proved to be exactly that in my personal experience. The most sinister crime I came across was an occasional tendency on the part of some of the older instructors to sermonise at length. But there are people in all walks of life that combine a fondness for the sound of their own voices with an inability to say anything original. It’s a human, not a Catholic or a religious failing.

Of course, the Jesuits owed their bad reputation to events of four hundred years ago. The torture and burnings of the Counter-Reformation came a long time prior to ambivalence within the Vatican over Mussolini and Hitler, and the child abuse scandals covered up by dioceses in Chicago and Dublin and a depressing litany of other places. But the Jesuit with whom I came chiefly into contact was probably the holiest man I’d ever met. Monsignor Delaunay was said by some to be distantly related to the great French painter of the same name. He organised occasional retreats at a house owned by the Church in Barmouth on the Welsh coast. The house was Georgian. It was a solid, isolated three-storey building overlooking the bay. To its left, majestic in the Welsh mist clinging to the sea, rose the great edifice of Cader Idris a few miles along the peninsula.

There was rumoured to be a monster in the sea at Barmouth. What lent the story credence was that it had originated with fishermen and not tourists. It did not stop Monsignor Delaunay enjoying his daily constitutional of a mile-long swim. He did not have the gaunt, fastidious look made stereotypical in his order by its grim founder. He was a strapping man with a hammer-thrower’s arms and shoulders whose sheer bulk defied the freezing water when he swam in the winter. At night, around a driftwood fire in the library of the house, he would tell his war stories of missions to Africa and South America. I always felt there were things he did not choose to share with his raw and innocent audience. But the tales were spellbinding nevertheless. In Barmouth, within hearing range of Monsignor Delaunay, I could really believe I had a future serving a great, merciful, formidable God. Delaunay had the rare gift of making faith contagious.

What did for me in the end was that I just couldn’t endure the cold solitude of celibacy. I craved physical intimacy. Rebecca cavorted in my dreams wearing nothing but a splash of her Guerlain perfume. The last three months were terrible. I was only nineteen and already facing the second great failure to afflict my life. And this one was wholly my fault. There was no mitigation to be had. I prayed, but doing so only seemed to demonstrate the futility of prayer. I prayed, the demeanour of a martyr concealing the instinct of a rabbit in heat. In such circumstances, I could hardly turn to the traditional source in a seminary of comfort and reassurance. Confession would have been of no help at all to someone so desperate to commit sin. There was no choice but to give up, and pack up and leave.

It’s fair to say that my father took this badly. Prior to the call of my false vocation, I’d been doing pretty well on a history and politics degree course at the London School of Economics. But the course was oversubscribed and they couldn’t see any way two years on to take me back. Despite my qualifications and past academic record, if a place did become available, there were more deserving cases than mine, apparently, on an existing waiting list. I ended up on a straight history course at the University of Kent at Canterbury. My father was gracious enough to pay my tuition fees and to help make up my grant shortfall which, in fairness to him, constituted practically the entire grant. But he did not really speak to me for about three years, and he chose not to attend my degree congregation. I couldn’t much blame him. I’d cost him his chance of an easy passage into Heaven. Even to a man as wealthy as my dad, that was quite a loss to endure.

Rebecca, of course, had long moved on by the time of what everyone still talking to me termed my release. She was dating a property developer from Fulham. I saw them together in a bar in Pimlico about eight months after leaving the seminary. I’d had a bit to drink. I might have picked a fight with him, had he been bigger and taller than he was and therefore an opponent I could goad into a scrap without being labelled afterwards a bully. But hitting him, even drunk, I knew was only marginally less infantile than letting down the tyres of his Porsche. I was hugely to blame for what had happened with Rebecca. She was only slightly to blame. The property developer was not to blame at all. But passing what I assumed was his Porsche, on the way home from that bar, I have to say I was sorely tempted.