Earthly Powers (3 page)

       "Yes yes." He did not seem to have heard of him. He beamed through the tall window at the garden scene: Father Azzopardi and Geoffrey taking tea together at a small green table under a white umbrella, Geoffrey talking and gesturing with animation, Father Azzopardi nodding, taking it all in. "These young people," said His Grace. And then, prodding my ribs very familiarly: "No hurry, I say. But still please regard the matter as urgent." One of those contradictions that come easily to the religious mind, God being quite as large as Walt Whitman.

CHAPTER 3

The gardeners kissed his ring, the maids kissed his ring, Joey Grima the cook kissed his ring. Ali did not but was shaken hands with very cordially and treated to a final Semitic quip. And when Geoffrey and I escorted His Grace to his Daimler, which was parked by Percius's Garage, the Triq Il-Kbira being narrow and my house possessing no forecourt, many villagers came running to kiss his ring—the two Borg sisters from the corner grocery, the entire staff of the police station opposite, an ancient squat known atheist in a flat cap who, all dusty, looked like some effigy from Malta's Palaeolithic past newly exhumed, embarrassed children pushed to it by their mothers, even the drivers and conductors of three converging buses whose passages the emerged Daimler blocked. I would now be thought better of in Lija and even neighbouring Attard and Balzan. The retired brigadier down the road, who, so Geoffrey had told me, despised me as a man grown rich on the writing of filthy yarns, was not so graced by archiepiscopal visitations. Geoffrey was saying, too loudly, to Father Azzopardi: "We could arrange a private showing for you. We have all the gear here. You'll never see it in the public cinemas. But for Christ's sake don't tell the archbish." Father Azzopardi laughed terribly heartily. To me His Grace said: "I'll be happy to see your deposition then. Mastery of the English language. Many happy birthdays once more. And please tell your young friend to be careful." No fool, then: he did not miss much. Father Azzopardi got in front with the driver, His Grace waved and blessed from the dead middle of the rear cushions, and the holy car sped soundlessly toward, say, Birkirkara.

       "Poor young swine," Geoffrey said as we went indoors. "I told him all about copulating priests and nuns in hot pants in the States. He doesn't know his arse from his elbow. What was it all about then?"

       "As I foresaw, I am to assist in the canonization of the late Pope."

       "Oh God, oh my God, oh my dear God, you? Oh, Christ help us."

       "Don't be silly, Geoffrey. You forget certain facts of my biography, if you ever, which I am inclined to doubt, knew them."

       "Ah, getting all stuffy now, are we?"

       "His Grace also asked me to tell you to watch your step."

       "Did, did he? I see. Highly honoured. Has his bulldogs sniffing round Strait Street, does he? Oh Jesus Lucifer Beelzebub Almighty, how I loathe and detest this bloody place."

       "You mean, I think, that there is no decent tradition of Islamic pederasty here. The whole place is dedicated to good Catholic family making. It is also, you would say, excessively hippy and bosomy. No dirty little boys with bodies like straight sharp knives."

       "You fucking hypocrite." He said this with little malice and followed it with a snigger. "None of that, eh? You must accompany me to the Gut sometime, dear."

       "The Gut?"

       "What the sailors call Strait Street."

       "I see, I see." We walked out into the garden with its fine high thick walls, walls built by men used to sieges. "I think the archbishop was right to ask me to ask you to watch your step," I said.

       "Fucking shithouse of a bloody place."

       I said, as we strolled down a shaded path, seeing the three cats play ambushes: "You know, Geoffrey, if you're really unhappy—"

       "Yes yes, dear. Percy in the Bahamas would be only too ready to have me, and there's Frank palpitating for friendship in Lausanne. The vicariously literary life of Geoff Enright, or from pillow to post office among the expatriate masters." He kicked a pruned twig out of his path. "I suppose, though, I have been just a bit wayward. The mail's piling up, as I am well aware. There are probably one or two royalty checks lying under the scum. But tomorrow morning—early—on the stroke of ten—I will really get down to the grind again." Knowing, of course, perfectly well, of course, that the old bitch hadn't much longer to go and one might as well, my dear, see the whole bloody business through. "Because you see, Kenneth"—he aspirated and nasalized my name and made it campily preposterous—"I am, in spite of my frequently quite unvolitional and usually deeply regretted misdemeanours, the thing you have averred rather too often that I am not. I mean faithful." I felt tears again ready to prick at that word. "Spiritually, I mean, I think I mean. I mean, what do you call it when it isn't just physical? That other thing doesn't really matter, does it? You've positively sermonised on that yourself, isn't that so? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you announce this very afternoon that that sort of thing was all over? For you, that is. All all, ah, over."

       We had arrived at a massive siege wall crawling with greenery, so we turned about, seeing the ambushing cats from another angle. The two gardeners, Mr Borg and Mr Grima—these seemed to be very nearly the only two surnames in Lija—were still placidly irrigating.

       I said, "Why don't we at least look at the more important letters after dinner? I've always, as you know, tried to be—"

       "Gentlemanly and punctilious, yes dear. But we're dining out. And there is to be a birthday cake, though not, I surmise, with eighty-one candles."

       "I didn't know. I'm not going. I'm not up to it."

       "But you have to be up to it, dear. It's the British Council man, Ralph Ovington, and the Poet Laureate, no less, is on a visit."

       "Oh, my God. And who defers to whom?"

       "A nice point, isn't it? You're the senior, of course. But he has the O. M."

       Yes, Dawson Wignall had the O. M. I saw myself in Geoffrey's twin mirrors—quite cold, not at all bitter. Willie Maugham, poor old bastard, had always maintained that the Order of Merit was really the Order of Morals. Three years previously I had been made, like him, a Companion of Honour and then heard the door of official laureation bang shut on me. The C. H. is about what the old bitch is worth, I'd say. As for the Nobel, I did not write inelegantly or tendentiously enough. I was not, like Boris Dyengizhdat, in political chains which, I felt sure, he would break soon enough when the dollar royalties had mounted sufficiently. I did not, like Chaim Manon or J. Raha Jaatinen, belong to a gallant little nation that, possessing no strategical resources, had to be compensated with a great writer. I was, they had always said, cynical, not given to deep feelings or high thoughts. But I still sold well enough. Geoffrey's office bulged with as yet unanswered fan mail; my birthday had been very adequately remembered. I fulfilled a need, and that was for some reason wrong.

       I said, sulkily, "I didn't know about this. Nobody told me."

       "You held Ralph Ovington's note in your very own hand, dear. You said nice of him nice of him or some such rubbish. You forget, you know, you forget things."

       "I'm entitled not to be well enough."

       "Listen, dear," Geoffrey said. "Have we not here the most delicious classical bit of psychowhatsit of everyday life? It's Ralph, isn't it, the name Ralph?" I looked at him. Strangely enough, it was true. Strangely, because I thought I'd got over Freud. I'd even dreamt of Freudian interpretations of the dreams I had just been dreaming. And there I had been kicking Ovington's name and note and invitation out of my head because of an onomastic coincidence. "Black bastard," Geoffrey said with no tone of malice. "Black bitch. Dear, you really must show yourself as often as possible at your advanced age, you know. Oh, you and I know you're alive and well and, well, wonderful really, but it's a good thing to show it to the Poet Laureate, who's an awful little gossip. If you didn't turn up he'd take it back home, you know, that the old bugger's on his way off to the neverneverland, and you'd have the newspapers sharpening their obituaries. Terrible thing, that."

       I sighed deeply. "Very well. I'll rest a little before dressing. In the study. Get Ali to bring me in some strong tea and a few pastries."

       "Is that wise, dear?" There was the old harridan in a terminal coma, oozing with goo.

       "Of course it's not wise. Nothing I do will be wise any more."

CHAPTER 4

On the walls of my study I had a Willem de Kooning female in mostly red crayon and one of the first sketches Picasso had done for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, also an Egon Schiele wash drawing of ugly lovers and an abstract composition by Hans Hartung. I had two oxblood leather club chairs and a matching couch, old-fashioned and chunky. Also books in glass cases, mostly of the well-thumbed-favourite variety: the main library was next to the upper salon. Near the original Quiller-Couch edition stood, not well-thumbed, not favourite, the revised Oxford Book of English Verse, bloody Val Wrigley as editor. I took this down and lay on the couch with it, looking for the inevitable selection from Dawson Wignall. I did not much care for what I found—insular, ingrown, formally traditional, products of a stunted mind. Wignall's themes derived from Anglican church services, the Christmas parties of his childhood, his public school pubescence, suburban shopping streets; they occasionally exhibited perverse velleities of a fetischistic order, though his droolings over girls' bicycles and gym tunics and black woollen stockings were chilled by whimsical ingenuities of diction. For this sort of thing, then, he had been honoured by the monarch: Thus kneeling at the altar rail We ate the Word's white papery wafer. Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer. But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel's food. Dear God! I reeled beneath the shock: My Eton suit, your party frock, Christmas, the dark, and postman's knock!

       I returned the book to the shelf and took down Who's Who, nearly staggering under its weight. I humped it over to what I called my Directory escritory and laid it on the blotting pad. There he was: Wignall, Percival Dawson—not yet OM, but tinkling with other awards. His list of literary achievements was exiguous enough, spare output being the mark of a gentleman writer, but the autobiographical epic called Lying in Grass was probably the dehydrated equivalent of ten of my watery novels. I turned to my own entry and gloomed proudly over a whole column of overproduction. Wignall was also Harrow and Trinity College; I was the Thomas More Memorial School and nothing. Ali knocked and I called adelante. While he placed the tea tray on the coffee table I heaved Who's Who back, shouldered rather. The aroma was of Twining's Breakfast Tea, which I took at all times except breakfast; at breakfast I drank Blue Mountain. Ali stood waiting as I poured.

       "Si?"

       He was troubled about something but found difficulty in expressing it. Something metaphysical then, not wages or women or living conditions. At length he said, "Allah."

       "Allah, Ali?"

       "Este pais," he said, "es católico, pero se dice Allah."

       "Yes, Ali." The cakes were Kunzel, imported in dainty packets of six. It was a comfort to be on a sort of British soil again. "Their word for God is evidently the same as yours, but it means the Christian version of the Almighty, not the Muslim one."

       This clearly troubled him. He said excitedly that there was no God but Allah, but Allah was not worshiped in churches, only in mosques, and that Allah was certainly not, so to speak, administered by arzobispos. In Tangier, he said, the whole situation had been perfectly understandable. The Christians had spoken of Dios. He understood that in their churches they had spoken of Deus—the same name almost. Here, however, in their churches—the arzobispo had told him in the bar there, while he drank deep in the manner of Christians—they referred to God as Allah. He did not understand. Not, of course, as I well knew, that he was what one might term a religious man. But the situation here struck him as strange. He had been taught as a boy that there was no God but Allah, and the Tangerine Christians had said there was no God but Dios or Deus. But these Maltese Christians said, just like Muslims, that there was no God but Allah. In churches. It was a strange situation. More, it was what might be termed a bad situation. That I should properly understand this, Ali gave me all available ways of putting it: mala-malvada-maligna-aciaga.

       I had now eaten my third Kunzel cake, enough. I said: "Once, Ali, in Catholic churches all over the world, they used the Latin name Deus. But now they have what is called the vernacular, since very few ordinary people know Latin. In mosques all over the world they say Allah, but in Catholic churches all over the world they use the vernacular. In Serbo-Croat Bog, in Finnish Jumala, I think, and in Swahili, I know, Mungu. Now here in Malta their language is a kind of Arabic, though it uses the alphabet of the Romans. And in Arabic and Maltese the word for God is the same—Allah. Is that moderately clear?"

       It was clear, he said, but it seemed somehow bad. Still, presumably the big men—arzobispos and so on—knew what they were doing, but nevertheless it did not seem right for Catholics in their churches to be calling on Allah. Then he changed the subject by taking from his white jacket pocket a small parcel and shyly handing it to me. It was a little regalo, he said, today being my cumpleaños. I checked the emotional lability by wondering why he had not made the presentation earlier. Perhaps because he knew that Geoffrey would say something sneering about it and this was the first time today he had found me alone. "Thank you, Ali, very very much," unwrapping it. It was pretty horrible, of course, by the standards of the sneerers of the world: a cigarette lighter of cheap metal encrusted with a Maltese cross. "Beautiful," I said. Ali waited. I struck it and it worked. Ali waited. I got myself a cigarette and lighted it. "Wonderful," I said, having drawn deeply. "It imparts a special taste to the tobacco." This was the kind of manifestly insincere response that Al's culture required. Satisfied, he nodded and went out, saying something with Allah in it, perhaps appropriate to a birthday. So. It looked as if it were not going to be easy to get away from His late Holinesss Pope Gregory XVII today, meaning fat little Don Carlo Campanati. His reforms were upsetting even Ali.