The Gospel Of Judas (12 page)

‘I don’t think it’s working yet. I’ve rung the company, but you know what they’re like.’

‘So I came.’

‘And the others?’

‘I’m awfully sorry, Leo. I mean, I
did
get through to the others … and we cancelled. But now that I’m here, I mean we might as well have a look …’

He tried to get out of it, tried to suggest that they postpone it to another day, but she insisted. ‘I really want to see the place, and here we are, for goodness’ sake, and so let’s. If it’s all right for you to be alone with a woman. I must say’ – regarding him with a comic, inquisitive expression – ‘you don’t
look
like a priest.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

She smiled, pulling a handkerchief out from her bag and wiping her face. ‘We will not create scandal. Priest alone in church with woman. I don’t think the News of the Screws could do much with that, do you?’

‘News of the …?’

She laughed. ‘
World
.
News of the World
. Goodness, which cloister do you come from? Come on, show me.’

So they ran round the corner – a burst of rain, a burst of laughter from Madeleine – and reached the door. On the noticeboard inside the vestibule there was a faded announcement giving the times of mass and a poster explaining that it had recently been World Mission Month and that there were many people out there who were very much worse off than any of you here. The inner door creaked open on a pulley system and slammed abruptly behind them. They were inside, in a vault as empty as a sarcophagus – as dusty, as stony, as cold. Grey columns rose up to a dank and shadowy roof. There was a tentative smell of incense, like the smell of mothballs clinging to some long-out-of-fashion dress. A sanctuary light burned dimly in the shadows at the far end, and a frescoed figure stared out of a nearby pillar like a ghost looming in the shadows of a haunted house. Outside the rain came down, an amalgam of noise like the rushing of a great wind, the wind of Pentecost perhaps.

Madeleine bobbed perfunctorily in front of the altar and clipped in her narrow shoes across the floor – cosmatesque spirals and circles – to the only painting that the place possessed, an entombment of Christ that looked to the untutored eye to come from the thirteenth century, but which was actually fifteenth and simply old-fashioned even when it was painted. ‘So?’ she asked, standing before her dead Saviour and looking across the uneven pavement at Newman. ‘Where are the secrets?’

‘In the sacristy.’

The sacristy was populated by heavily varnished wardrobes and a sideboard with the instruments of mass on it.
Set into the wall beside the door there was a lavabo with a ceramic Mother and Child above the basin, the work, so a handwritten notice assured the onlooker, of the school of Andrea della Robbia. Surprisingly in this still and dusty place, there was also a human being, an ancient crone hiding in ambush behind a stand of dog-eared postcards. She glared at the couple as though they had already committed some gross act of desecration. Newman wished her
buon giorno
, although all the evidence from outside (a crash of thunder which set the whole building shaking) was to the contrary. The ancient woman remained impassive in the face of the storm and the greeting. ‘
Mille lire, per le luci
,’ she demanded.

Madeleine scrabbled in her handbag. ‘I must pay.’

‘It’s only a thousand lira.’

‘It’s the principle.’

The old crone regarded the money with suspicion. Then she surrendered a rusty key and gestured towards the corner of the room where there was a narrow door that looked as though it might lead into a broom cupboard or something. ‘
Giù
,’ she said. Down.

The door opened to discover a narrow spiral staircase descending into the bowels of the city. Madeleine peered into the pit. ‘How horrible. You go first.’

So they wound their way down into the past, like a descent into a tomb, like a descent into Hades, Madeleine’s shoes clipping on the iron stair just behind his ear and her voice echoing in the drum of the stairwell. ‘I don’t like this kind of thing,’ she said. ‘I hated it under Saint Peter’s. I get all claustrophobic …’

But there was nothing enclosed about the space below the church where the stairs led, nothing cramped or claustrophobic – it was wide and empty and grey with dust.
A string of bare bulbs lit the place with a blank and inquisitorial light. They climbed down on to the dusty floor and clambered over wall footings and round pillars. There were bits of pavement beneath their feet and earthenware pipes and blocks of volcanic tuff. Pillars rose up like stalagmites in a cave to support the roof of the building, which was the floor of the modern church directly above.

‘Where are we?’ Madeleine asked. She craned to see, her face open with amazement. ‘
When
are we?’

‘About the second century AD. Some kind of public hall converted into a Christian place of worship. People probably worshipped here who remembered Paul and Peter in the city.’

The idea stopped her. She stood there in the midst of the urban litter of the centuries like a flame, a bright flame in the grey ashes. What did she think? Did she feel that
frisson
that comes from an apprehension of the past, that little thrill of propinquity? That is what he assumed. He read nothing more than that into the glance she cast in his direction (hazel eyes, the scattering of faint freckles, the slight frown of concentration). ‘Can you
feel
them?’

‘Who?’

‘Those early Christians.’

‘That’s your fey Irish for you.’

‘It’s imagination.’

‘Do we want imagination?’

She glanced round and up. ‘If not, why come?’

The smell: a smell of the centuries, dead and airless. Somewhere beyond a low wall a mosaic emerged from beneath the dust like a sore showing through an animal’s pelt: the outline of a fish drawn in grey basalt tesserae. He called her over to see. ‘It’s time for your fish lecture,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

Symbols, signifiers, signs. Fish is a curious one:
ichthys
, a fish. It is an acronym, in fact, for
Iesous Christos Theou Hyios Soter
, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. They used it as a sign of recognition, casually tracing the design in the dust with an idle, scraping toe, or scrawling it on a wall just as they do nowadays, just as someone had chalked the slogan
Dio c’è
– there is a God – on the wall of the Palazzo Casadei just beside the main entrance.
Dio c’è
. It’s an interesting proposition.

‘If you’ve heard it already, why ask for it again?’

‘You’re offended. I only meant it as a joke. The others, you know what they say? They say, goodness he’s serious.’

‘Isn’t that what you’d expect from––’

‘A priest? I suppose so. And they also say––’

‘What do they also say?’

She crouched down and brushed her hand over the fish shape, and as she bent her hair fell forward like a cascade of seaweed. Even her hand was like something marine, a pale starfish floating over the fish, tapering fingers with a scattering of freckles like a subtle cryptic coloration. She swept some dust away from the single crude eye so that it could see more clearly. ‘They say, why on earth did he become a priest? What a waste.’

Madeleine looked up and there was something else there, some other sign, perhaps: the silent, eloquent gape of her neckline, her breasts hanging there in the shadow like forbidden fruit amongst the leaves of a tree, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. ‘What a waste,’ she repeated.

That was the moment when there was a crash of thunder outside, a massive explosion from the upper world that intruded even there eighteen centuries earlier, reverberating around the ancient walls like an earthquake. That was the
moment when the lights went out and plunged the two of them into an all-consuming darkness.

‘Oh, Christ!’ Madeleine’s voice was shrill with panic. Darkness, total darkness pressed up to the eyes and lay against the skin like a suffocating cloth. It offered no perspective. Only her voice, sharp, momentarily terrified, gave depth to the darkness around them. ‘Oh, my God. Where are you? Leo? Where are you?’

‘It’s all right. Don’t be frightened.’

‘Of course I’m bloody frightened.’ Darkness as a substance, pressing against the cornea, pressing in on the body like a shroud. ‘Where are you, Leo. Leo?’

‘Here. Come towards me. Mind the wall.’ There was a movement, a scrabbling like rodents amongst the dust, a suppressed cry as she stumbled; and then something live crept through the mask of darkness and grasped his hand, a small, fragile animal clutching at him.

‘There you are.’ Her voice was suddenly mere inches from his face, just below his chin. The sound of her breathing was palpable in the blackness, a disturbance in the tissue of darkness, as though something were tunnelling through it to reach him. ‘Thank God,’ she murmured, clambering up and leaning against him in relief, shaking with what he supposed was fear. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

He felt her breath. He put out his hand speculatively into the void and touched her cheek and the soft pulp of her lip. ‘What is there to apologise for?’

‘Don’t let me go, Leo,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t. I’m sorry. Don’t.’ A strange alternation of demand and apology: I’m sorry. Don’t. I’m sorry. Don’t. Her hair had a scent about it. He half recalled it from the enclosed, airless intimacy of the confessional: a warm mammal smell mingled with other perfumes – the scent of citrus, the scent of musk, the
scent of other things that he could not name or imagine. Frankincense and myrrh, perhaps. Scent is dangerous, stirring dull roots. The word
redolent
comes from the Latin verb
olere
, to emit a smell. He had once read that the centre in the brain that is concerned with the perception of aroma is next to the memory centre, so that the one stimulates the other. Smell recalling the past, the smell of attar of roses and lemon. The first time he had embraced anyone for years. His mother. The distant girlfriend called Elise. No others. Proust with his madeleines, he thought, and smiled through the faint sense of revulsion, the feeling of wanting to push her away, the sensation of something at his throat, clasping the windpipe, constricting the windpipe, choking him and making him want to vomit, closing and opening at one and the same time. Aperient and astringent.

And scent doing something else, something that he would have to come to terms with later, confess to some anonymous priest – for he would be loath to speak of it to his usual confessor who would tell him what he did not want to hear, that he should put temptation away and never see the woman again. He didn’t want an admonition like that. Already he was bargaining with his God. For in that embrace he felt a palpable tumescence. And he experienced the bewildering sensation that the physical may be bound up entirely with the spiritual, so much so that he was uncertain which had happened: had lust dragged down love, or had the spiritual, the cerebral elevated erection to a prayer?

How long before the lights came on? One minute? Ten? There was first a distant twilight and a shout from the upper world – the crone who guarded the souls of the dead coming with a torch – and then the bulbs themselves flicked on once, twice, and then remained on, to display the
waste of rubble around the clinging couple, stark in their unshaded light. They parted in embarrassment. ‘Oh God, how awkward,’ she cried, avoiding his eye and brushing herself down almost as though ridding herself of some kind of contamination. ‘I really think we’d better be going, don’t you?’ She picked up her skirt a fraction and examined her knee. ‘Blast, I’ve torn my tights on that wall.’ She didn’t look up. She no longer looked at him, no longer caught his eye and smiled in that manner of hers, part irony, part curiosity, part wondering whether she was missing something that others had understood. She didn’t look at him. It is said that you can tell when a man and a woman have become adulterers. Before the event they watch each other all the time, steal mutual glances at every opportunity. After they have consummated their passion they avoid one another’s eyes.

From that moment in the darkness of the palaeo-Christian subterranean Church of San Crisogono, Madeleine Brewer avoided Leo Newman’s eye.

A voice on the phone, disturbingly familiar, a faint tone of mockery, a sharp hint of the profane. ‘Can I come round and see you? I want to talk. Will it be difficult?’

‘Here at the flat?’

‘Wherever.’ Outside the open window was the scream of swifts and the distant roar of traffic down the Lungotevere. Inside, within the dull boundaries of his apartment, he sweated. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said.

‘The flat. The lion’s lair.’

She came at ten-thirty in the morning. He watched her from the window as she walked along the pavement on the far side of the street. She crossed to an island in the stream of traffic, glancing up for a moment at the Palazzo Casadei
in front of her, waiting for a break, an eddy in the whirl of car and bus and moped that might let her across to the near bank. A bus stopped to disgorge passengers nearby. She plunged into the flow, a small, determined figure in navy skirt and sensible walking shoes and a bright red jacket. A wide, slightly masculine stride. He watched her disappear directly below.

Fear? Nothing so focused. Confusion. A sense of choking panic. A faint hint of revulsion at the prospect of her smell, her presence, the fragile sound of her voice. And impatience, an impatience that was without direction or focus, just an impatience that the thing should be over.

She apologised as she came in, although it wasn’t clear what she had to apologise for. She looked around distractedly and threw her jacket – blood red, a haemorrhage, a clot – across the back of the chair that she and Jack had given him, and said how sorry she was to bother him; while Newman fussed around her, drew up a chair for her to sit, apologised for its discomfort, busied himself making a cup of coffee at the electric ring in the narrow kitchen. Absurdly he found himself ashamed of his room, of the dull furniture and the paltry possessions. These were things of which he had once been proud: proud of their deficiencies, that is.