The House of Lost Souls (22 page)

His faith had been severely tested even before the outbreak of war. He had been a novice priest when a great passenger vessel foundered five hundred miles from Newfoundland at night in the freezing Atlantic. He had read the newspaper account with greedy incredulity; unable to believe a merciful God could allow so many so young and innocent to perish in such hopeless circumstances.

‘April of 1912,’ Lascalles told Seaton and Mason. ‘I was a boy of seventeen when the
Titanic
went down. My vocation was almost sunk with the doomed ship.’

But he was young. And the young have enthusiasm. And his enthusiasm renewed his belief in something more exalted than a world of profit and sensation and the imperial hunger of nations. So the outbreak of war in Europe hardly intruded on his own intense speculations on the true meanings of the Gospels. Or of his intense joy at discovering the poetry of his fellow Jesuit, the Welshman Manley Hopkins. In the spring of 1916, he was ordained a priest in Rome by the pontiff himself.

But it transpired there was little time to rejoice in Eternal Truth or debate theology with other learned servants of God. And there was even less time for poetry. By the summer, Lascalles had been seconded as chaplain to an infantry battalion of the French army. By the autumn, he was reading funeral rites over mass-burial pits filled with quicklime as they interred French dead by the hundreds, by the day, during the battle for Verdun.

‘Do either of you know about what happened there?’

‘I’d say Paul here is more of an Easter Rising man, Father,’ Mason said. ‘For him, 1916 is all about Patrick Pearse and Michael Collins and the occupation of the Post Office in O’Connell Street.’

‘It was still called Sackville Street then,’ Seaton said. ‘But you’re right enough. I don’t know anything about Verdun.’

‘It was the collective name for a system of supposedly impenetrable fortresses,’ Mason said. ‘They were built by the French to discourage German thoughts of invasion. The flaw lay in the massiveness of the fortifications and the number of men they committed to a static defensive role. By 1914, all the more astute German commanders knew that Verdun could simply be bypassed by a modern mobile army. But the German Chief of Staff, von Falkenhayn, knew the French would feel obliged to defend it. It had come to represent national pride. A full assault would commit the bulk of the French army and make them an easy target.

‘Since the progress of the war had made Verdun a salient in the French line, it could be attacked by heavy artillery bombardment from three sides. The French still refer to Verdun as the last great battle. But, in reality, it was a slaughter, only really distinguished by the number of dead it claimed.’

‘The siege began in February,’ Lascalles said. ‘It finally petered out in October. By then a million men had been killed or wounded in the battle.’ He paused for a moment, remembering. And remembering vividly, Seaton thought, from the shadow inflicted by the recollection on his face. ‘By the autumn I was counselling the still-living, comforting the wounded and burying our legions of dead entirely by rote. I believed in nothing. Cruelty and chance and sometimes absurdity dictated human life. Instinct and cunning permitted survival. There was no afterlife. There was no hope. And certainly, there was no God.’

There was silence. Mason broke it. ‘Why did they send you to Passchendaele?’

‘You might think because Falkenhayn had familiarised me with slaughter. And because your General Haig planned another. But the truth is, the British had sufficient chaplains of their own, in all denominations. They had no practical requirement for a French priest who no longer believed.’

Seaton said, ‘So why did you go? Why were you sent?’

‘Wheatley,’ Lascalles told them.

He had heard the story before being seconded, because rumour spread fast along the front and different languages proved little obstacle to the proliferation in wartime of legend and myth. So he had heard, in the mess, the story of the English artillery officer whose men had become too unnerved to serve any longer under his command. It was an odd situation, because the mutinous artillerymen were campaign veterans, battle-hardened gunners who prided themselves on their professionalism in the field. It was not the usual matter of cowardice or shell shock or exhaustion. Instead, the story was that they had seen something that had subsequently made several of them risk execution for mutiny rather than continue to fight in their particular unit. And they were adamant, these men. They were adamant even in the peculiar light of what they claimed to have seen.

The officer concerned had been hit by an enemy shell. The violence of the blast should have blown him into vapour. But in the aftermath of the explosion, as soil and debris rained back on the smoking earth, he was seen to clamber from the shell hole, ragged and smouldering, but intact. Incredibly, he seemed entirely unscathed.

‘I walked over to him,’ a bombardier facing an insubordination charge was quoted as saying. ‘It was dusk, but you could see pretty well. Better than I would have liked to, it turned out. What I noticed straightaway was that he didn’t move right. He wasn’t staggering, like you see the wounded and the dazed stagger on a battlefield, looking like men seeking somewhere comfortable to fall. Instead he had this stiffness about him, like you see with a strung puppet in a pier-end show. And when I got closer to him, a flare burst directly above us and I found myself staring right at his eyes. You couldn’t look into them. They were dead. They had the sly sparkle you see in the glass eyes of a ventriloquist’s doll. But they were quite deprived of proper life. I pulled up, still with the field dressing in my hands I’d torn from my pack to treat him with in the event there was anything left of him to treat. In the fading light of the flare, you could see his movements becoming smoother and more convincing. More human, if you will. I was still rooted to the spot by the sight of him. And then, as he brushed mud and ash from the rags that were all that was left of his uniform, he cocked his head with a jerk that made me jump and smiled at me. And the smile was the smile of a man deprived of his soul. I can’t put it more truthfully than that. And I can swear to you on a Bible I had not taken a drink. I remember the word from Sunday School. The word is abomination. What I saw that evening at the front was nothing more or less than an abomination.’

‘When my colonel showed me this statement, I was intrigued by it,’ Lascalles said. ‘Its contradictions were odd. Here you have a corporal who is clearly a veteran of combat, bravely attempting to assist his officer in the middle of an enemy bombardment. He is experienced and he is courageous. And something makes him insubordinate.’

‘And terrified,’ Seaton said.

Mason sipped water.

‘Forgive me,’ Lascalles said to his guests, smiling. ‘Allow me to offer you something stronger to drink.’

The British requested Lascalles because they needed an expert in magic. An authority in the subject was required to dispel the rumours circulating about the artillery officer it was said had bartered his soul for survival in battle. Soldiers were superstitious. Stories like the one about the Angels of Mons were encouraged, even fostered by the High Command because they suggested that the Almighty fought on their side. But this business was different. Officers were there to lead by example and to be believed in. They could not very well sacrifice this one to appease a single unit of uneasy men. But the fortunes of the war made it difficult in 1917 to end a mutiny at the end of rifle barrels. Firing squads were bad for morale and the planned assault at Passchendaele was going to be difficult enough, without further damage to the spirit and commitment of the troops.

The Jesuit Lascalles had gained his expertise in the subject as part of his studies. He had researched witchcraft in rural France. He had witnessed an exorcism performed in Madagascar. He had studied apparent accounts of demonic possession in Suez and French Equatorial Africa. He knew enough to suspect that the occult was both pernicious and widespread. But he was agnostic about its authenticity. He did not believe in the miracles of God. So he could hardly believe in the miracles of Satan.

His meeting with the English officer took place in a dugout about a mile behind the line. It was November of 1917 and the afternoon, like every afternoon, was spent under the dark pallor of the bombardment. He went there unescorted. The duckboards were treacherous under his leather-shod feet as he tried to pick his way through the labyrinth of support trenches with a hand-sketched map guiding him. It was raining and the map was limp and wet in his hands and the ink on it ran as he tried to navigate. He was half-lost and very conspicuous in his grey French field uniform and blue-trimmed cape amid the vigilant sentries and well-drilled teams and toiling packhorses of the British rear. This was the idea, of course. His arrival was well-witnessed. And he could see from the expressions on the men’s faces that they all knew why he was there.

He found Wheatley alone, turning over a tarot pack, his quarters lit by a paraffin lamp artfully hung so that Wheatley’s features were mostly concealed in shadow. He saw that the English officer wore a greatcoat with the collar up and a muffler and leather gloves. It was cold, of course. It was a raw November, cold and always damp, in these tombs hewn for the shelter of the living, in the ground.

‘Whisky, Father?’

Lascalles accepted. He did not drink whisky. He had wanted to see Wheatley’s hands. But in this he was disappointed. The bottle and glasses were reached for from their shelf and the drinks poured with the gloves still on.

‘So. What in heaven’s name can I do, I wonder, to assist a Catholic priest.’

‘I would like to ask you, if I may, about your time aboard the sailing ship. Before the war. Where you went. What you did. Who you met. And what you might have learned.’

Wheatley was silent for a moment. He said, ‘I learned to cross an ocean without spending every waking moment vomiting over the side. I think that was probably my single greatest accomplishment, Father. And, of course, I learned to tie a fairly impressive array of nautical knots.’

Lascalles nodded. He looked at his glass on the table they shared. If anything, it was getting gloomier in the dugout, the wick of the storm lamp hung behind Wheatley burning ever shorter and its flame more feebly. There was just enough light for Lascalles to see the liquid in his glass tremor with the shock through the earth of great and distant shells exploding.

‘You don’t believe in magic, Father Lascalles,’ Wheatley said. ‘No more than you believe in God. No more than I do. This meeting is a charade. I think you should do the dignified thing. Give me a clean bill of spiritual health. Then go home and struggle with your own absence of faith.’

Lascalles took his matchbox from his pocket and shook free a match and stroked it sharply against the rough side of the box. He smoked a pipe in those days and his English waterproof matches were the long-shafted, brighter-burning sort designed to kindle a reluctant bowl of pouch tobacco. Wheatley held out the flat of a palm to shield himself from the glow of the flame and Lascalles saw two things. He glimpsed a couple of the bronze symbols strung from the runic bracelet on Wheatley’s exposed wrist. And he saw the skin on Wheatley’s brow, below his cap, above the raised gloved fingertips hiding his eyes from the flare of sulphorous light.

‘His skin was white, the colour of soft cheese,’ he told Mason and Seaton, both sipping wine now, instead of water, from their goblets. ‘And it was moving. It was stretching and pulsing as though tiny worms wrestled beneath it as it repaired itself, regained its life and cell structure. There seemed something both urgent and furtive about the process. It was hideous. Seeing that, knowing the significance of the symbols strung around his wrist, I knew that the bombardier whose testimony I read had been telling only the unembellished truth.’

‘Did Wheatley say anything?’

‘He said, “You’ve the manners of a potato farmer, Father. I’ve been disfigured by a gas shell and don’t wish to be stared at until I’m properly healed.” And then he laughed. Of course, he laughed.’

‘But you’d exposed him,’ Mason said.

‘My son, it was I who had been exposed. I had strutted through the English trenches to our assignation, the master of situations. For over a year by then, my secret scepticism, my clandestine but total lack of belief had protected me. I was immune to the dangerous optimism engendered by faith. I understood the meaninglessness of war and life. I had long ceased entertaining hope. I was perfectly equipped for survival. And then I saw what I saw that afternoon and was confounded. And exposed.’

Seaton said, ‘What did you say in your report?’

‘Only that I could not wholeheartedly recommend him.’

‘And what happened?’

‘I believe he was given a medal, decorated and then transferred. You have to understand the circumstances. Canvas field hospitals adrift in seas of mud, staffed by boy doctors recently qualified in the genteel examination rooms of Edinburgh or Oxford. Young men engulfed in horror. And the Germans did use experimental ordnance. Both sides did. His story would have been more plausible than the truth. That’s assuming he was even subjected to an examination. I cannot tell you if he was. I can tell you that I never saw him again and remained, in a curious way, always grateful to him.’

‘He restored your faith,’ Mason said.

‘He did, Nicholas. He proved to me there is a Devil. And what on earth would be the point of a Devil, my friends, without a God?’

Mason excused himself. He said that he wanted to smoke and would feel more comfortable doing so outside. Lascalles assured him that smoking was a tolerable vice in the room they were in, but Mason was emphatic. It was a lie. He had no cigarettes on him and no intention ever of smoking another one again. He had smoked all he had in Whitstable and bought no more on the TGV, where supplies in the buffet had been plentiful and cheap. The truth was, he had been shocked by how short of breath he’d felt on the run in the morning with Seaton. A decade of alternating between self-pity and fear had done little evident harm to the Irishman’s lungs or legs. His bank balance and love life may have suffered, but his fitness was impressive and his pain threshold surprisingly high. It had taken seven tough miles to bleed the competitiveness out of Seaton and the experience had left Mason short-winded and somewhat disgusted with himself. He liked to win. It was a matter of pride. And he liked to be in the best shape he could. That was a matter of survival.

He walked through a chilly vestibule that smelled of wood polish and holy water. The priest had offered them wine but, as with the food, had taken none himself. Mason well remembered how spartan had been the conditions they had found him in, huddled over his rosary, at that riverbank in Africa. Here, he suspected that Lascalles lived even less indulgently. Was it habit? Was it penance? The opulence of the library they had been shown to was strictly for public consumption. This seminary sang with the hard and vibrant piety of self-denial and rededication. He knew without having to see them that Lascalles’ quarters here would in no way reflect the man’s pastoral history or present distinction. They would make no concession, either, to frailty or to age. His choice would be a stone cell and a truckle bed and maybe the luxury of a bucket under it to piss in during the night. Lascalles was not here, as Seaton had assumed, to count out his last days in smug contemplation of his own past spiritual glories. Lascalles was here to purify his soul and face his maker and His judgment.

It was cold in the courtyard. The snow was soft and powdery under his feet in the cold. It had stopped snowing. But there were four inches of fresh powder light as spun flour under his feet and Mason wished for a moment, with all his heart, he was occupying one of the chalets in the town below, looking forward to taking the cable car to the top of the glacier in the morning. He closed his eyes and pictured the long tricky traverse and the steepling off-piste descent he had skied down so often from the top of the glacier, descending through the pale wilderness, with its blue shadows and silences. Turning ever downward. Down the remembered valley into Argentière.

He knew the mountains, too. He had climbed Mont Blanc and the Grande Jorasse and the Matterhorn as part of his training. It had been challenging and interesting to learn to do. And Mason had enjoyed the technical demands and accomplishment of each of his climbs. But he had loved far more to ski. With his eyes still closed, he felt as though he was very nearly grieving for the sensation of it now. Jesus. It was almost as though the Irishman’s sadness was a contagion, as though Paul Seaton’s persistent melancholy had crept uninvited into his own psyche.

He opened his eyes. But the mood would not lift from him. He thought for a moment about the Irishman’s lost unreconciled love. Lucinda had been her name. He’d had lovers of his own, but he didn’t think he’d loved any of them the way Paul Seaton had so briefly and poignantly loved Lucinda Grey. He’d had more than his share of drunken one-nighters. He’d had a fairly prolonged passionate romance in Germany, interrupted by the professional complications of postings and leave. And he’d embarked on a dangerously stupid affair in Ireland with the wife of a Provo quarter-master. He’d done it simply to spite the man, a murderous player regarded as untouchable for ‘operational’ reasons no one ever properly explained to Mason. But he’d become very fond of Sinéad, with her grey eyes and her lethal temper. She’d never have left the bastard, though, regardless of the circumstances. The love of her two young kids welded her to the marriage.

If he thought about it, nearly all of Mason’s significant relationships had been with other men. He’d taken lives and he’d saved them, too. More of the latter, he hoped, than the former. He had hated his enemies and he had sincerely loved his comrades. And he had shared his own life most intensely when its very survival had depended on their loyalty and their courage, and their coolness under fire, with his brothers in arms.