The Devil's Diary, page 8
‘Not today, thank you. I’m going back the way I came.’
‘Back to Brennan’s Gehenna! Or do you carry it about with you?’
Below them the Devil’s Pintle with its surface of blackened age, sprang out of the water. At its base lay two submerged rocks from which dark fronds of seaweed reached out towards the land, wavering tentacles searching blindly in the ebb and flow.
‘Do you want a lift home?’ he asked Hugo.
‘Home? This is home,’ Hugo smiled. ‘I’ll linger for another while. Don’t wait for me, I’ve got my boat.’
Father Jerry made his way down the slope towards an old quarry where he had parked his car. The narrow moor road stretched emptily in front of him, leading back to the larger glen and a world he at least found comprehensible, even though he had rejected it. He had come out here to escape from that world for an hour. Today he had found an alien place that wakened within him a presence he could describe only as that of a stranger.
He drove slowly in third gear with his mind on the humpbacked island crouching rodentlike in the afternoon sun.
‘The alert conscience weighs accurately and reacts quickly,’ he said aloud. ‘But any judgment of conscience that precedes action must have its basis in something approaching certainty. All I know is hearsay and supposition. When I act, it must be from faith, not doubt. In the meantime I must pray for guidance and clarity, remaining alive to every hint and nuance. If I ride with my back to the engine, I shall see my bridges only after I’ve crossed them.’
In the morning Hugo said that he was going to town on business. As soon as he had gone, Father Jerry drove to Smug Rone Pier where his brother kept his boat. He had decided to make an expedition; he felt puffed and excited, as if he were entering a race that must on no account be lost. He relaxed somewhat as he nosed out through the narrow inlet. The strong smell of salt and sea all round dispelled the sense of enclosure with which he had begun the day.
A heat haze hung over the water, and behind him in the east the mountain tops melted into a low sky. The day could not have been more suitable for what he had planned. First, he would go south to the Sound and troll lazily and purposelessly for an hour. Then he would go out wide and swing north to Scariff Island, concealed from the shore by the haze. The realisation that he was bent on a mission of mercy gave him a sense of peace, yet the knowledge that he was intent on concealment made his sense of peace less than perfect. After an hour he had caught five young pollack and a codling. He munched an apple, then headed north.
When he had put the bay behind him, he kept within sight of the cliffs and the shore because his navigational powers were far from sure. After what seemed an eternity, a dark outline loomed through the haze, farther from the land and longer in shape than he had expected. As he approached, the island emerged from a light veil of luminous vapour and became a grey-green hogsback with a selvage of black rocks opening on the landward side into the little cove that Hugo had described in his diary. He cut the engine and rowed in slowly. With raised oars, he sat waiting for a sound or movement.
‘Brennan,’ he shouted. ‘Brennan, are you there?’
He scanned the rocks and listened, reluctant to draw closer. He received his answer, a shriek from a cormorant as it rose from a whitened rock to his left.
He rowed round to the seaward side, keeping a watchful eye on the shore. The island looked weathered and bare, stilled in a timeless silence. At the narrow end a stony beach formed a doormat before a wall of round, black boulders that looked as if they had been heaped in a hurry to block a concealed entrance. It would have been possible to moor the boat and climb up through the boulders but again he rejected the idea of going ashore. He returned to the landward side and waited. Glenshask and the Devil’s Pintle formed a vague outline in the haze behind him. Convinced at last that he would find no one on the island, he beached the boat and made his way up an uneven shingle strewn with dried seaweed that crackled underfoot. It was an eerie and unsettling place in which to be alone, and when he spotted a heap of clothes on a rock less than ten yards ahead, it seemed to him that they had materialised before his very eyes. He glanced over his shoulder at the boat, and again at the neatly folded clothes. It was like discovering a footprint in a place where no footprint should be. The jacket and trousers were undoubtedly Brennan’s. What he experienced as he touched them was not so much unease as revulsion.
‘Brennan,’ he shouted again. ‘Brennan, do you hear me?’
He spent an hour exploring the island, looking for empty Bacardi bottles or anything else that might substantiate Hugo’s narrative, but the clothes were the only indication that someone else, possibly Brennan, had been there before him. There were no rabbits either, nothing but heaps of brittle sea wrack and the whitened bones of birds. He returned to the shingle and went through the pockets of the jacket and trousers which were empty except for two white pebbles the size of goose eggs. He rolled the clothes into a neat bundle and hid them behind a rock at the upper end of the cove. Then he hurried down the rough shingle, pushed out the boat, and jumped aboard while it was still moving. He could not say why he had left the clothes behind. All he wanted was to get home or better still wake up and realise that the events described in Hugo’s diary were indeed a dream.
He spent the afternoon in his vegetable garden trying to collect his thoughts. He realised that most priests, indeed most people, would now go to the police. Yet all he could do was walk round his runner beans in a state of tense hesitation, weighing conflicting responsibilities and asking himself whether his loathing of Brennan and all his works had vitiated the affective side of his conscience, making recognition of the good nothing more than a remote and intellectual process. To break silence would incriminate his brother, perhaps wrongly; and to maintain silence was tantamount to condoning what was possibly a criminal act. It was a dilemma from which there was no riddance. Conscientia perplexa was what his professor of moral theology had called it. No matter what he did he would take on the burden of a bad conscience, an abiding awareness of personal imperfection.
After dinner he sat in his study listening for the hum of the Land Rover in the driveway. He flicked through a book on ethics, too anxious to put his mind to the endless distinctions and classifications. He went to his desk and with painful deliberation wrote another postcard:
Dear Dr Sharma,
I brought back two egg-sized beach pebbles from a bare island, one rough and grainy, the other smooth. The grainy one is less cold to the touch, and when I turn it over under the lamp it emits little pinpoints of white light. The smooth one is ellipsoidal; the grainy one spherical with a little omphalos on one side which I caress with the pad of my thumb.
Tonight I placed them on my desk with a red-cheeked apple in between. The apple came alive, though in the bowl among other apples it had looked quite lifeless. I took a bite from its rosy side and it became an ugly and accusing skull between the two mutely perfect stones. When I munched it to the core, the space between the stones was empty and gaping. I did not fill it again. This is not a dream. The stones are in my trouser pockets. I have touched them once again to make sure.
Kind regards,
Father Jerry
With a sense of stillness he read what he had written. The words had come slowly across a void. They were not what he wished to say, yet the act of putting them on paper had had a calming effect on his mind. What he needed was certainty because he already had the desire to act honourably and the wish to overcome a threatening evil. He would cross-question Hugo again; and his judgment, when it came, would be definite and unambiguous, taking account of all possibilities and all the circumstances.
Meanwhile his postcard would land in Dr Sharma’s letter-box together with promotional mail from pharmaceutical companies and gas and electricity bills. He had first sought her help at a time when the world had become for him a place of terrifying darkness, when he had despaired of ever again seeing a glint of hope-inspiring light. He had been working as a curate in north London, in an area of decaying Georgian buildings and pinched noses that seemed to skewer him in the street. He had met her first at the hospital where she worked as a consultant. When she discovered where he lived, she invited him to her house in Islington one weekend for tea. She sat opposite him in a black-and-gold sari, a sheet of finely woven cotton that enfolded her lean, brown body so that only her face and sandalled feet remained exposed.
‘Your life has been invaded by the past,’ she said. ‘Those boyhood friends you speak of — Brennan, Hugo, McDaid and Mary Rose — belong in a richer life whose passing you can’t accept. The relationships you formed then affected you in a way you are still trying to apprehend, and now the memory of that time has encroached on the present like an angry sea that meets with no solid resistance.’
For six months she listened to the tedious litany of his anxieties, mainly at the hospital and now and again at her home. She had told him that he was her favourite patient, and he trusted her as he would a confessor or spiritual director. They discussed oriental philosophy and Christian theology, and one day she told him a Hindu proverb that burst on him in a flood of sunshine: ‘If you have two loaves of bread, give one to the poor. Sell the other — and buy hyacinths for your soul.’ He did not for a moment believe that it was her proverb that cured him, but the thought of the hyacinths had released a kind of peace within him, a singing that he could barely hear, or hear only by listening carefully.
Gradually he came out of his sickness, sloughing off the too-tight skin that had bound his wounded self. She had told him that she could not give him back his old self, and that he accepted with a mixture of relief and regret. His new self was more outward-looking and less sensitive than the old. The poet in him had died, the poet who had been making him unhappy, misanthropic and ultimately less than human.
‘Will I write poetry again?’ he had asked her.
‘I don’t know. It depends on why you wrote it in the first place.’
‘To achieve some sort of equilibrium between myself and the world, I suppose.’
‘You may never write a poem again, you may never need to.’
He felt wistful at the thought of what he had lost. The cure was a trick, a piece of mechanical manipulation, and Dr Sharma was an optician placing different ‘lenses’ before his eyes and asking him, ‘Is that more comfortable?’ She was too clever to deny his imagination and its demons. Instead she had found a means of accommodating them. Now he was detached from the struggle, his desires no longer hot and clamouring, and his thoughts had acquired the disembodied quality of thoughts that do not root in the evil-smelling tilth of the heart.
‘You had withdrawn from the physical world,’ she told him on his last visit. ‘You’ve been away. Now that you’re back you must not allow yourself to be abducted again. Touch, touch, touch. Familiarise yourself with the textures and contours of things.’
She offered him her hand and he held it for a long time without speaking. When he told her that he would never forget the debt he owed her, she said that she would always be pleased to hear from him if he should ever feel the need to write to her.
Again he placed the beach stones on the table and, closing his eyes, touched them gently with his fingertips. When he heard the crunch of wheels on gravel, he hid them under some papers in the drawer of his writing desk. He went into the hallway to meet Hugo whose face registered extreme excitement.
‘Have you heard the latest about Brennan?’ he asked.
‘He’s alive and well and playing host at the motel?’
‘His body has been washed ashore. A sheep farmer from the mountain found him wedged between two rocks in the shadow of the Devil’s Pintle. He was naked apart from his underpants, and he didn’t look in the least like a man who’d been dead ten days.’
‘What did they say at the motel?’
‘They were like beagles on the scent, every man with his own theory, even men who normally leave thinking and talking to their wives. McDaid was the exception; throughout the evening he smoked like a chimney and said nothing. The great question was where our friend had spent the last ten days. He’d grown a beard, you see, which means that he couldn’t have been dead.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I looked into my pint and muttered to the man beside me, “There’s more to this than meets the eye.” I’m the only man who knows the truth. I had a dream over a week ago and I wrote it down. It’s nothing short of clairvoyance and I’m nothing short of a genius.’
Hugo ran upstairs and returned with the casebound diary.
‘It’s all there. Read it and see.’
Father Jerry studied the entry for July 6th, then handed back the book to his excited brother.
‘Who is the narrator?’ he asked.
‘Who else but me? I wrote it down exactly as I dreamt it, every word.’
‘You dreamt that you marooned Brennan on Scariff Island, leaving him with enough food and drink for a week?’
‘In my dream it was a humpbacked island full of rabbits. Brennan appeared as Robinson Crusoe but I knew all along that he was our friend in fancy dress. I told him to keep a weather eye out for cannibals, and as the island receded, it took on the shape of a young rabbit petrified by fear. Now that’s something I forgot to record in my diary. You can never boil a day down to five hundred words, and a dream is a thousand days in one.’ Hugo spoke eagerly, his big face flushed under a spreading beard.
‘You left him food?’
‘Only corned beef. I told him to eat grass if he wanted to avoid scurvy.’
‘Did you leave him goose eggs?’
‘The nearest thing to eggs I left him was a packet of Birds Eye custard.’
‘You didn’t mention that in your diary.’
‘Again, I forgot.’
‘Now perhaps you can forget your dream and tell me what really happened.’
‘This is how I see it, reconstructing the events I’ve recorded. Brennan realised that his creditors were getting restless. He wasn’t man enough to face them, so he decided to go into hiding to give himself time to think. He got McDaid to run him out to Scariff Island. After a week he felt lonely and made the mistake of trying to swim ashore. Or perhaps he headed for the mainland knowing that he’d never make it. Suicide arranged to look like accidental death.’
‘It doesn’t hang together. If Brennan wished to abscond, surely he’d have left the country with whatever ready cash he could muster. No one in his right mind would willingly spend ten days on a bare island living on tinned food. It seems to me that he was taken there by force and that he drowned while trying to escape.’
‘Of course, we’re assuming that my dream is true. It’s possible that he may have been hiding in Glenshask or Glencrow.’
‘Wherever he’s been, he will have left traces of his stay. If he swam ashore from Scariff, his clothes will still be on the island. Do you intend making a trip to verify your dream?’
Hugo studied his brother’s face before exposing his teeth in an ambiguous grin.
‘I don’t think so. The man is dead. Your problem is solved. There’s nothing more to do and nothing more to say.’
‘You’re sure you’re not being less than frank with me?’
‘Less than frank?’
‘Do you know more than you’re letting on?’
‘I know only what I’ve dreamt, and I’ve shared my dream with you. Consider yourself privileged. I don’t propose to share it with the police.’
‘I think you should destroy your diary. It’s open to misinterpretation to say the very least.’
‘Dreams are wish fulfilment, I believe. It’s no fault of mine if now and again my dreams come true. If all of them came true, I should be worried. As a man of moral character, I couldn’t afford to sleep.’
Hugo laughed gleefully as he went off to bed. Within five minutes he was back, still full of his own ingenuity.
‘I’ve thought of a defence,’ he said. ‘My diary is not a diary but a novel in the form of a diary. All good diaries aspire to the condition of the novel, and mine is no exception.’
Father Jerry sat pondering until the fire in the grate had died and the lights in the neighbours’ houses had gone out. Three years ago he had lived through a nightmare of misshapen monsters which, with Dr Sharma’s help, he had come to realise had been his own creation, calling into question his capacity for objective experience.
‘Now you are hesitant and unbelieving,’ she had said. ‘You are on the way to recovery but you still lack the unconsidered faith we all need in order to face each day. Naturally, you would like to think that your perceptions are as valid as anyone else’s. Don’t worry, the core of your personality will reform, and you will once again be able to accept your experience in spite of other people’s “knowledge” of its subjectivity.
He went to his writing desk and took out the two white beach stones. He placed them on the table and rubbed the smooth one and then the grainy one with the forefinger of his right hand. Finally he took a stone in each hand and rubbed them simultaneously with the pads of his thumbs.
‘Hugo’s dreams are my nightmares,’ he said. ‘He thrives among the monsters that almost wrecked my life.’
Chapter 8
In the village Father Jerry could sense an atmosphere of excited speculation. The pathologist who had carried out the post-mortem said that Brennan had been dead no more than two days before his body was found. His lungs were full of salt-water. Apparently he had drowned following a heart attack while in the sea. The local doctor hinted at deeper mysteries. Brennan, he said, had been drinking heavily before he died; his blood contained twice the amount of alcohol required to impair an average man’s balance and judgment. The local police carried out a search of the north coast and Scariff Island but no trace of his clothes or any other belongings was found.
