Dark Echo (8 page)

It took me an hour to get to Wimbledon and then another forty-five minutes to travel the half-mile distance to the storage facility car park. When I did finally arrive, I could see what had gridlocked the road. There were two fire tenders, as well as an accident investigation vehicle and a Met police car together blocking half its width. There was foam and surface water all over the road and the fire crews were still damping down. It was odd, because I’d seen no column of smoke nor heard the whoop of sirens waiting impatiently in the crawling column of traffic.

Most of the steel-framed, breeze-block storage buildings looked intact. I felt fairly sure that my father’s precious
modern art collection and my mother’s gathered keepsakes would be undamaged and undisturbed. I knew with the certainty of a sinking heart what had been destroyed by the blaze.

A garrulous fire-fighter confirmed it for me. I asked him what had started the fire.

‘A strongbox full of old books was the seat of it,’ he said, chewing gum, his face black with soot from the smoke. ‘Burned with unbelievable intensity, it did. Wonder the fire didn’t spread, but it didn’t, thankfully. Took us ages to put it out, though. We’ve been through two shifts just damping down.’

‘Someone used an accelerant?’

He raised an eyebrow and looked down and rocked on his booted feet. ‘Not for me to say, mate. Out of order for me to speculate. But paper doesn’t burn like that. No way. Not at those temperatures. Not without a bit of encouragement.’

I nodded. I smelled the air. It was acrid, still. Foam from fire hoses gathered as brown and yellow scum in the street gutters, seeking drains. I’d hang about, of course. I’d verify facts with the people who ran the storage facility. I’d wait in a grey afternoon in this dismal bit of South-West London’s suburbs and establish facts. But I knew with certainty that it was the
Dark Echo
’s five-volume log that had burned, before I could read it, before Frank Hadley could get his judicious hands on it. The fire had been started in the night, in the small hours, when I’d been enduring my wretched, dream-ridden sleep. I didn’t know where it left our restoration schedule with Hadley’s yard. I didn’t even know how long it would take for them to inventory the damage and break the news of the loss to my father. In fact, only one thing was certain any longer in my mind. I would tell Suzanne. I would tell her everything, the moment she got back from Dublin. I did not
believe that a problem shared was a problem halved. I did not believe in any platitudes with regard to this particular matter. But I did think that continued secrecy could be dangerous. And I was too scared at the momentum with which events seemed to be progressing to keep matters any longer to myself.

My father used to say that confession was one of my distinguishing talents. Perhaps, he used to say, the only one. None of his jokes were ever really intended to provoke belly laughs. They were all cracked in the way of scoring points. But he had a point, where this particular crack was concerned. My failed vocation wounded him very deeply. It was what I was alluding to earlier when I said I had exhausted my credit with Dad where matters spiritual are concerned.

At the age of nineteen, I thought I had a vocation for the priesthood. The tug of faith in me felt overwhelmingly powerful and I did not try to resist it. I left university and joined a seminary and began to take instruction. I immersed myself in the piety and self-denial of serving God. It was about as unfashionable a life-choice as it would have been possible then to make. My vocation came calling in the 1990s. A certain sensitivity had become voguish among thinking men, an imperative to get to understand your masculinity and be more open and honest generally with women. It was a fad that would degenerate towards the end of the decade into navel gazing and a sad kind of self-obsession. But just then, sensitivity of a sort was acceptable. What was not, were cassocks and incense. The last time the Catholic clergy were fashionable was probably when Bing Crosby wore a dog collar and gave his speaking voice an Irish lilt in those sentimental Bowery-based Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s. Since then, it had all been downhill for the image of the priest.

My friends were appalled. They reacted as though I had become the victim of a cult. Most of them just dropped me. The couple that didn’t tried to save me from the dangerous delusion about to sabotage my life before it had properly begun. My girlfriend of the time interpreted the whole process as a crisis of sexuality. I had discovered that I was gay but did not dare confront either her or myself with the truth. Her weird take on what was going on provoked in me the sin of vanity. Could I have been so hopelessly non-committal in bed with her? I hadn’t thought so at all.

My father was delighted. My vocation made sense of everything in me that had confused and dismayed him. It justified my lack of aggression and competitive fire. It made a virtue of my dreamy inclination towards solitude. Best of all, I think, it provided him with grace. The sacrifice of his son to the priesthood was exactly like the medieval buying of indulgences by wealthy men too busy generating profit to find the necessary time for prayer. Only it was more so. My father wasn’t ungodly, which was a sort of irony. He believed very devoutly in an omnipotent and sometimes vengeful God. But business life had compromised his chances of redemption and he had been lax in guaranteeing adequate compensations for his sins. In short, he was badly overdrawn at the Bank of the Almighty. My electing for a celibate life of poverty and devotion, in the service of his God, put him right back in the black. I’m guessing in saying that, but I think I’m right. I know my father and the knowing of him has come harshly earned. It’s a well-educated guess.

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.

Between discarding Rebecca and meeting Suzanne, I did have relationships with women. But they were casual and sometimes callous and always fleeting. Romance and spontaneity are, I think, the biggest casualties of the age of the text and the email. Everything now seems so contingent and circumscribed. There’s no place for sincerity when you can so easily avoid the honest call of a human voice. Thank God for the Shadwell Pussies, I used to think. They delivered Suzanne, saved me from solitude and brought me love. That’s what I used to think, before I sat her down after her return from Dublin and told her everything that had occurred since my father’s purchase of the wreck of the
Dark Echo
.