A Lost Tribe E-Book

William King

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 384

Beschreibung

Behind the high walls of a Dublin seminary, students for the priesthood gather around a television set to watch the opening of Vatican II. Seduced by the power emanating from Rome, these young men have abandoned their natural instincts to follow the Nazarene carpenter. But the seminary is choking their freedom. The spirited Mac is expelled for a tryst. Others too pack their bags. After ordination, the leave-takings continue. It becomes clear that the Irish Church is reluctant to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Later, the same Church will be rocked by sexual scandals. 'A Lost Tribe' is a poignant story of the rise and fall of the Irish priest, from being God's representative on earth to becoming a member of an endangered species.

Leseprobe

A Lost Tribe

william king

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

DUBLIN

Dedication

To a teacher and a gentleman at Scoil Treasa Naofa, fadó, fadó.

Epigraph

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

To see our best side, not our worst.

Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

ONE

Through one of the high windows of Coghill House, Tom Galvin scans the lawns fronting the houses of St Paul’s seminary. The great copper beeches at the far side, which line the boundary walls, are shimmering in the heat. Now and again a light breeze flicks through the leaves on its way to Griffith Avenue; the trees then settle back into their noonday sleep. Diagonally across the lawn is O’Kelly House, a clean-cut building of Portland stone in neo-Georgian style. Free-standing and partly hidden by larches and fir, it resembles a fine country house in parkland.

The building was opened and blessed sixty years before in the mid 1950s when St Paul’s was, like all seminaries in the country, overcrowded; wooden cubicles with a curtain for an opening were set up in the Junior House gym to take the overflow. After blessing the foundation stone, Archbishop Browne addressed the students – boy-priests with army haircuts, Roman collars and black soutanes. On the raised platform in the Academy Hall and flanked by the rector and staff of the seminary, the archbishop was glad to announce that by the end of the century, ‘we will be ministering to well over a million souls. The harvest is rich, dear students,’ he assured them with forefinger and thumb of one hand on his glittering pectoral cross, the other fidgeting with the folds of his purple silk cloak. ‘This auspicious day is a source of great encouragement for me, and a sign that we are responding to the motto of this great seminary: Omnes ad te Domine.’

By the end of the century, Archbishop Browne’s coffin, covered with a patina of green dust, would be resting among the pile of other archbishops’ coffins in the crypt of the Pro-Cathedral. The houses of St Paul’s would be cold and empty, with paint flaking from the walls; the few remaining students would be accommodated in one wing of Wansborough House. Priests were saying that the seminary should be sold and the students sent elsewhere for their training, but Browne’s successor put his foot down. ‘St Paul’s was the cradle of my vocation; I will not be the one to close the gates.’

No sooner had the next archbishop been installed than he transferred the remaining seven students to Maynooth and drew up a leasing agreement with Anna Livia School of Business and Marketing. The agreement brought millions to the diocese – much of which was spent in compensating victims of clerical sex abuse. Some of the land – once the back pitches and the farm – was sold off to a developer, who built a housing estate, mostly duplexes, and called it The Friary.

Heavy lorries and diggers trundled in to demolish the old ball alley and to prepare the ground for a student car park and bar. In jeans, design-torn at the knee, young men and women, carrying books and flirting beside the noticeboards, animated the dead corridors. Over the urinals, and the women’s toilets, the students’ union posted notices giving information on safe sex. One read: Going out for the weekend? Stay safe: bring your condoms. Lecturers – in economics, business and marketing – wove their important way in and out of chattering students as they hurried to lecture halls or to interviews on the radio about the Celtic Tiger’s latest achievement.

A clause in the transfer of the campus stipulated that the former seminary be made available to the priests of the diocese at a reduced rent, for their annual retreat and other meetings.

Now, as Galvin scans the lawns, his fellow seminarians of many years before take shape in his mind. In the room where he stands looking out, about eighty of them wearing soutanes and birettas and carrying theology books, gathered each morning. The scraping of chairs and the clatter of books as they took their places at the long rows of desks that faced the lecturer’s podium echo in his brain.

Waking from his reverie, he becomes aware of the few diocesan seminarians helping out while on their holidays from Maynooth – the last seminary in Ireland to remain open. They flit around, tidying the room, gathering up hymn sheets that have fallen on the floor and arranging the chairs for the next talk. Since the retreat began, they have been hurrying about the corridors in soutanes. One of them wears a wide sash around his waist. He is checking the PowerPoint and the microphone.

The evening before, as priests were drawing up in cars and others were gathering at the foot of the stairs to chat, Galvin came across a man who had been in St Paul’s with him. He was struggling with his bags.

‘Here, I’ll give you a hand,’ Galvin offered.

When they reached the landing, the priest leant on the bannister to catch his breath. ‘A bit of company; ah, sure isn’t it great … especially nowadays.’ Looking down the stairwell, he said: ‘When I was coming out this evening, cars were pulling up across the road; families arriving for supper with the grandparents – you know the scene. Taking their toddlers out of the SUV. Mickey Mouse sunshades.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t you feel you’re excluded from the party? Life I mean.’

‘Indeed.’

He took Galvin’s measure. ‘You’re looking fit, Tom. What are you on?’

‘Keeping the best side out. A jorum at night goes a long way. Although my doc keeps telling me to cut back. Sure one or two does no harm.’

‘I can’t touch it anymore.’ He rubbed his stomach. ‘Where are the retreat talks?’

‘One end of the theology room in Coghill; the one near the library, remember?’

‘Hah. What next? And to think we used to fill the chapel. Seems like only yesterday.’

‘And the poker sessions till morning.’ The heavy look gave way to a twinkle. ‘You weren’t bad yourself with a hand of cards.’

‘You learn a lot on a Kentish Town building site on a rainy day. The summers of my real education.’

Down below, other priests were hauling in bags and greeting one another. The priest took a Sunday paper from one of his bags, giving Galvin a view of his dyed comb-over.

‘Look.’ He sighed and slapped the page with the back of his freckled hand. On the photograph, a priest they both know is handcuffed to a guard and being led to the open door of a Black Maria. In the dim light of the corridor the two fell silent. The priest stuffed the newspaper back into his bag and forced a smile.

‘Getting ready now for five days of peace. No phones or funerals or someone complaining that the crown of lights over the Blessed Virgin’s head is not switched on, or that the vacuum cleaner for the church isn’t working. Sheer bliss.’ Some of the old sparkle from when he had been the life and soul of clerical golf days was returning.

Galvin picks up a leaflet containing the retreat director’s summary of the previous night’s talk. ‘Despite the dreadful revelations that have unfolded,’ the Benedictine with the clipped English accent had said, ‘the Church and you and I have to make atonement for the crimes and sins of our brothers. Do not, on any account, try to deny that dark side of our nature. Learn from it. And remember the angels of darkness disguise themselves as angels of light. That said, do not lose hope nor the dream that brought you to this seminary many years ago.’

‘My brother priests,’ he had continued, ‘there is a lack of true spiritual energy among the presbyterate. It is called by different names – low morale, or burnout. I call it the noonday devil. Remember the desert fathers and how they were inclined to despair, having been weakened by this demon. This must not happen to you.’ Despite the gravity of his message, he managed to break into a smile from time to time while he took in his audience.

The dream. Galvin scans the grounds again. Yes, the senior students – those close to ordination – and their assured footsteps resounding beneath the vaulted ceiling of the ambulatory on that mild October evening when he had first set foot in St Paul’s, come bounding back. ‘Incontrovertibly, the Vatican Council will bring about a renaissance. The best time to be coming into the priesthood,’ one student had assured him.

He returned to the Benedictine’s summary. ‘I cannot give you a key to understanding what has happened to the priesthood in this country in the past thirty or forty years. The Book of Job will be my main source for this retreat: it teaches us that precise lesson, which is, Job would never understand.’ He had cited chapter twenty-eight of Job.

In the Bible, Galvin finds the reference: Where does wisdom come from and, where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living … and kept close from the fowls of the air. Cold comfort. He looks through the open window again. Priests are strolling up and down outside, so close he can hear their conversations.

‘Ah God, is that the way it is?’ The silence that follows is broken by the scuff and scrape of their shoes on the gravel path.

‘Yeah, diagnosed last January. Had a scope. It had gone too far.’

‘He won’t be back to the parish then?’

‘Unlikely.’

‘We’re all in the waiting room now, lads. How quickly it all … .’ The voices fade.

At each side of the main door of Wansborough House, where the driveway becomes an apron for turning cars, more priests relax on garden seats, or chat, as cheery as schoolboys on the first day of the long summer holidays.

Galvin steps out of the room, down the corridor, and through the dim vestibule. Outside the high double doors, the seminarians, now finished their tidying of the room, are playing with a black cat. One of them, with braces on his teeth, looks up as the cat rubs its head along his soutane. The seminarian is in a jaunty mood.

‘The retreat director is excellent, isn’t he, father?’

‘Excellent.’

‘If there’s anything you want during the next few days, just let us know.’

‘Thanks. I will.’

‘It’s a beautiful life, father.’

‘What’s …?’

‘The priesthood. It’s a beautiful life, isn’t it?’

Galvin keeps sidling away. ‘It has its moments.’

‘I mean saving souls.’

‘Yes, of course. That’s what our life is about.’

‘Father, the deacons in Maynooth are so looking forward to ordination day. Will you remember them in your mass?’

‘I will.’

The seminarian is anxious to talk. ‘They had a couple of days off after Easter, and guess what? Didn’t they go to Rome to buy vestments at Gamarelli’s. Isn’t that good?’

‘Gamarelli’s! My goodness. Yes, that’s very … interesting.’

‘Celibacy is a great gift from God, father. It’s going to be the heart of my priesthood.’

‘Good.’

To avoid offending him, Galvin stops for a moment. ‘How many of you are there in Maynooth now?’

‘Seven. One for ordination this year, and then no one for the next four years.’

‘Changed times.’ Galvin begins to open his breviary as he moves off. ‘Nice cat.’

The seminarian bends down and talks to the cat. ‘Yes, you are a nice moggie, aren’t you? A lovely moggie.’

By the rose bed a priest tries to light his pipe; he nods in the direction of the seminarians and says to Galvin, ‘God help them. Little do they know.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was at an ordination last week down the country. You won’t believe this. The candidate for ordination was wearing a fiddle-back chasuble – you know, pre-Vatican – made out of his mother’s wedding dress. Well, the braiding anyway.’ He chuckles between puffs. ‘Old man Freud would have a lot to say about that!’

‘Till death do us part.’ Galvin gives a little laugh and continues walking around by the narrow path that runs along the perimeter of the grounds. In places, overspreading trees form a green roof and dappled sunlight falls on the cedar needles. All the while, fragments from the retreat director’s talk run through his mind: ‘The Book of Job, fathers, shows us that Job would never understand the misfortunes he had encountered and would have to make peace with that mystery, which is at the centre of life. You have had that darkness in your souls for the past few years.’

Priests walk up and down in front of O’Kelly House, heads downcast, as if looking for something they have lost. Rosary beads sway behind their backs. The papal and national flags lie limp on the poles in front of Wansborough House.

Galvin rests for a while on a garden seat and looks around. He needs these few days to mull over the twists and turns his life has taken for over forty years as a priest, but more especially the horrific revelations of the Hegarty Report, which divulged how priests abused children, and his own guilt that, as the archbishop’s secretary, he didn’t wake up to the full force of events, even if excluded from the discussions on camera.

He would never have survived the ups and downs of life, he now knows, if it hadn’t been for the overnight stay with the monks at Mount St Joseph’s. For years he has packed a bag once a month and driven down to the monastery surrounded by the lush Tipperary fields; there he found a space to reflect on the rugged path he had chosen.

The tide is receding for the Church; some vital force is dying within Galvin too: faith in life, in God, his sadness at the naked ambition of those who once had prostrated themselves in humility before the bishop on the day of their ordination. He is striving to recover the dream of his youth but, like an ageing marathon runner, he no longer has the legs. These few days will give him an opportunity to reflect and to try and understand why it all collapsed in the blink of an eye. To stir his memory, he has brought with him diaries going back many years.

Among the ancient trees that dominate the lawn is a giant oak, known to generations of students as Old Pompey. Youthful voices full of confidence return from his seminary days, the clink of cutlery in the refectory: ‘Did you know that Beresford, the Lord Lieutenant, had rebels hanged from its branches during the ’98 rebellion?’ ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ ‘Oh, he did. Bad bastard.’

Farther left and at the top of the curved driveway is the centrepiece of St Paul’s, Wansborough House, with its plain Doric front and, by contrast, the ornate swags and yellowed alcoves on the side nearest the Pugin chapel. In cut stone over the door is a Latin inscription: Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis – ‘Come to me all who labour’.

He rummages through the miscellany of thoughts from the retreat director’s talk: how St Ignatius of Loyola used keep a death’s head on his desk to remind him of the shortness of life. And he gave them a motto: If you want to live, prepare to die. It was an echo of the same message from the rector on Galvin’s first night in the seminary. ‘Faster than a weaver’s shuttle, young gentlemen, your time will pass in St Paul’s.’ Yes, like the fifty years that have gone by since that evening as he and twenty-six others arrived at the seminary.

TWO

That autumn evening of 1962, crows clamoured in the wide-spreading branches of the same chestnuts and beeches of St Paul’s, as if they too sensed something important was about to unfold among the warm terracotta colours of Rome. To mark the opening of the Vatican Council, papal and national flags had been hoisted on the flagpoles. Red, brown and golden leaves formed a collar around the base of the trees, and fell too on the sandy path and on the curve of driveway up from the main gates. From down by Church Road, smoke curled from a mound and mingled with the faint smell of the sea. Cars were pulling up to the front door of Wansborough. Senior students rushed to help take suitcases from car boots. Wearing deep black suits and holding felt hats, the first years – Galvin among them – made a brave effort to look casual.

When all the cases had been hauled upstairs to Coghill House, the rector, slit-eyed when he smiled, nodded and made his way from one family to another.

‘Tis a mighty place ye have here, father,’ Galvin’s father said, as if he were calling across a bog in windy weather.

‘Mighty?’ The rector looked at him. His eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yes, mighty.’

‘Tommy is a great worker, you know, father. We’ll miss him at the hay and the pickin’ of the spuds.’

‘Rest assured, Mr Galvin, that Thomas’s youthful energy will be put to good use in the Lord’s vineyard.’ He stole a glance at his watch. ‘We’ll speak again before you go.’ He thanked Galvin’s parents for giving their son to the Church and, raising his voice, announced to all that tea would be served in the Academy Hall.

Later, the parents began to clamber into their cars. Waving at their sons, they cruised down the driveway and disappeared at the curve just before the main gates. Galvin’s parents waved awkwardly from the back seat of a hackney car headed for Kingsbridge Railway Station.

All over the grounds, students were chatting. Senior students wore a row of shiny buttons down the front of their soutanes, a sign that they had graduated from university and were studying theology. They exchanged an odd mixture of jokes and fears. The priest to be feared was Murtagh, the junior dean of discipline: known as the Phantom from the way he stole through the early morning darkness to say mass for the Christian Brothers in Marino, he was a dark figure in a slouched hat and long black coat. He appeared out of nowhere, lurked beneath the main stairs to check if every student was in time for Lauds and slunk across to the archbishop’s house after nightfall to make regular reports.

One of the Shiny Buttons looked steadily at the papal flag.

‘Vatican II will change everything. I can’t wait to hear the recommendations,’ he declared. The floor made a hollow sound beneath the arched roof as they walked along the ambulatory. A deacon, who would be ordained the following June, stopped to make a point. He had a serious look on his delicate features.

‘If it hadn’t been for the Council … I mean prisons like this.’ He swept his outstretched hand over the front of Senior House, gaunt and gothic. ‘I can assure you, it’s the hope of the Council that’s keeping me here.’

‘Me too,’ another said. Nodding, they moved on.

One of the group, a second year called Mac who bore a remarkable resemblance to Michael Collins, leaned over to Galvin as talk of the Vatican Council and Pope John XXIII progressed, and spoke in a low voice: ‘Some of these fellows think the sun shines out of their arses. Take no notice. Anyway, getting out every day to the uni makes it easier. Eoin MacCarthy,’ he said, and extended his hand.

They passed by other students, some sitting, others standing around a fountain. A senior student was pointing towards the folly like a tour guide. Names were forgotten as soon as they were introduced, but one stood out for Galvin. Damien Irwin, a second year arts student. All afternoon he had been popping up here and there, giving advice: how not to incur the Phantom’s anger, how to manage an extra visit from one’s family.

‘Give us the High Command, Damien,’ one of the Shiny Buttons said.

‘Yeah, go on, Damo.’

‘Who is the High Command?’ a first year asked.

‘Shh!’ one of the senior students said.

‘The archbishop,’ a student at the back of the group piped up.

Irwin made sure the coast was clear, and then, like a professional actor, he worked himself into the role, dipping one shoulder and holding in place an imaginary pectoral cross. He spoke in a low, measured way, mincing his words: ‘I aim to ensure that the seminarians at St Paul’s will be well nourished – prunes and porridge every morning; they will have regular bowel movements.’ Then he arched one eyebrow and pursed his thin lips as he scrutinized his audience. Those who recognized the accuracy of his impersonation laughed loudly. He picked on one student. ‘Always use Astral soap, young man.’

‘Why, Your Grace?’

Scrunching up his face, he turned on the student. ‘Hygienic reasons, young man. Shouldn’t that be clear to you? Wash the private parts of your body. ’

‘What do you mean, Your Grace?’

The High Command gave him the dreaded stare. ‘Your mickey, young man. Wash your mickey with Astral soap.’ They guffawed again.

‘The holidays haven’t changed you, Damo,’ someone said.

‘Have you met the Phantom?’ Irwin asked one of the first years.

‘Not yet.’

‘Different kettle of fish,’

He moved on to a take-off of the junior dean of discipline. Squinting, and in a voice filled with intensity, he hissed: ‘My job is to get rid of half of you before next June.’

Suddenly, Winters, the senior prefect, was standing at the door of Wansborough, frowning and clapping his hands. He barked: ‘All freshmen will go to your rooms and dress in soutane and biretta, and then proceed in silence to the refectory for supper where Dr Murtagh will address you. Monsignor Curran, the rector, will then read the rules in the oratory and, because this evening is special, all students are granted the privilege of speaking during supper.’

‘Let’s go, lads, or your man will have us up before the Phantom,’ Irwin muttered under his breath.

The dark wood of the long refectory tables and stools, set end to end, and the heavy brown wainscoting and pulpit completed a picture that was both cheerless and Spartan.

‘Except on feast days or other special occasions, you will eat in silence: a student will read from up there.’ Winters pointed towards the pulpit high above the tables with steps leading up to it. Metal chandeliers, like giant spiders’ legs, hung from the ceiling. Dull brown oil paintings of sullen bishops and Monsignors clasping prayer books to their chest lined the walls and rested on dado boards. At the head of the room, beneath a painting of Abraham taking his son to the mountain to be sacrificed, was a table perpendicular to the others. ‘This table is for the rector and staff,’ the prefect told them. ‘And occasionally we are privileged to have His Grace, Archbishop Browne, dining with us.’

In their new soutanes, the first years stood in line between two rows of tables. They had been assigned seniority according to the date they had applied to the seminary. Not long out of primary school, two boys with white aprons were wheeling a trolley: its wheels made a grating sound across the red and black tiles.

The Phantom had stolen in without their noticing and, having inspected their soutanes and shoes, began walking up and down the refectory. Suddenly he stopped dead in front of a student.

‘Where’s your biretta, young man?’ He made fussy gestures with his hands. ‘You should have your biretta.’

‘In my suitcase, father,’ he replied in a thick country accent.

‘In my suitcase,’ the Phantom mimicked. ‘The right place to have it, I don’t think. Don’t let me catch you without your biretta again.’ He chopped the air with his hand. ‘Do you consider yourself above the rules? Is that it?’

‘No, father.’

‘Doctor. You address me as doctor.’

Muttering about how ‘some people manage to get in here,’ the Phantom tripped to the top of the refectory and stood beneath the picture of Abraham and his son.

‘Be clear about this. It is my aim to see the rules are kept. Any student who thinks that he will pull the wool over my eyes had best leave his bags unpacked. The archdiocese requires men who will be obedient to the Divine Will, which is always’, his forefinger shot up towards the spiders’ legs, ‘expressed through your superiors. St Paul’s was here before you and will be here after you, in case you have lofty notions about changing the way things are done.’

Galvin stole a glance at the student. He had the same lost look he’d had that afternoon at Kingsbridge Station when Galvin had come across him, pushing his bicycle.

‘Are you going to St Paul’s?’

‘I am.’

‘Where are you from, garsoon?’ Galvin’s father was standing nearby and heard them talking. He’d only been to Dublin twice: to see Kerry play Armagh in a football final and when his uncle, a priest of the Los Angeles diocese, was dying in the Mater Hospital.

‘I’m from outside Abbeyfeale, sir.’

‘Don’t mind your “sir”, young lad. Good, honest people in Abbeyfeale. I sold calves there once. Come on with us and throw your bike in the back of the hackney car.’

After supper they joined the Shiny Buttons in their common room. It was loud and claustrophobic: blue smoke formed a haze around the hanging lampshades. The senior students knew all about plays in the Gaiety and the best films showing that summer in the Dublin picture houses. They recounted the jobs they had got picking strawberries in England’s West Country and working in factories around Manchester. A surge of anxiety rose within Galvin: his mouth was dry and he felt trapped, like when he had been a child and the Wren Boys had burst into the house one St Stephen’s Day playing melodeons and flutes, and he had hidden under the kitchen table.

One of the Shiny Buttons was doing the rounds of the tables: he was tall and loud and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘I’m John Mike Noonan,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind the gobshites that run this place. Just do your own thing. Very soon we’ll have a half day every week, and newspapers, and they’re also promising a television set. Any of you lads play rugby in school?’ Before they could answer, he announced, ‘I played second row on the Senior Cup team that beat ’rock a few years back. Back door at three tomorrow. See if one or two of you might make the team this year.’ He moved on to another table.

Mac leaned towards Galvin. ‘Your man, Noonan,’ he whispered, ‘thinks he’s God’s gift to the world. The father came up from Limerick, arse out through his trousers, made his money out of a couple of cash-and-carry places and one or two pubs. Loaded. Big house in Greystones and now racehorses. This place is top heavy with bullshitters like Noonan.’

The din of conversation in the smoke-filled air was getting too much for Galvin, but he kept smiling and picking up fragments of conversations, as if from a badly tuned wireless.

‘A television?’

‘Yeah, but only to watch the opening of the Council.’

‘J. Desmond won a scholarship again this summer.’

‘Tell us something new.’

One of the Shiny Buttons gave the first years a heads-up. ‘Don’t be caught in another student’s room after lights out. Jesus, if they find you … .’ He made a throat-slitting gesture. ‘A fellow was caught two years ago and his parents had to collect him the following day.’

‘Why so?’ the lad from Abbeyfeale asked.

‘Why so?’ The theology student grinned and looked around slyly at the others. ‘You’ll find that out in time.’

Mac hissed at the Abbeyfeale lad: ‘Let’s take a stroll. I’ll show you around. Anyway, I need to clear my head. Tommy,’ he beckoned to Galvin, ‘will you join us?’

‘I will.’

The night air was filled with the smell of smouldering leaves and the promise of good tidings from Rome. Mac raised his head and sniffed.

‘Paddy the caretaker was at it again today.’

‘At what?’

‘Burning leaves,’ said Mac, laughing to himself. ‘By the way, he has a fantastic-looking daughter, Gill. Lovely Legs, we call her; she won the Lovely Legs of Glasnevin competition a couple of years ago.’ He pointed towards a cottage inside the main gate. ‘She lives there. The gingerbread house.’

The Westminster chime was tolling in a nearby Protestant church. Swan-necked lamps lit up the sweep of avenue and the walkways along the perimeter of the grounds, setting off the limestone facades, recesses and decorated walls of Wansborough House. They illuminated the students moving in the semi-darkness, their shoes scuffing the gravel path in front of Coghill House. An orange glow hung over the city. Cars passed by on Griffith Avenue and church bells tolled.

‘I’m sure you’re finding all this a bit strange,’ Mac said to both of them. ‘Don’t. You’ll learn a lot in here about life if you keep your eyes open. Many of the fellas come from well-heeled families. Fathers are doctors and lawyers. Jesuit boys. They’re the ones given the privileges and sent to Rome for further studies. Lick-arses, if you ask me.’ He laughed.

Only half listening to Mac, Galvin was caught up in the beauty of the seminary campus, in the hopes and expectations of the senior students, and how everything would change after Vatican II. And in this flurry of excitement he was aware of Mac telling them that he was from Skibbereen and had got on the Cork minor football team a couple of years before.

‘Take no notice of that gobshite the Phantom,’ he said. ‘After coming here, I wrote to a friend, not knowing that the Phantom opens all letters. He called me up. “Is that your letter, Mr MacCarthy?” and he screwed up his ould face as if he were holding a piece of shit. “Yes, Dr Murtagh,” I said. “Read it for me.” And he made me read the letter. I was giving out about the place and saying that there’s a bollix here called the Phantom and that he’s the worst of all. I had to plead with him not to expel him. “My parents would be very upset, Dr Murtagh. Please give me another chance. I want so much to be a priest.” I was grounded for a month, and when the whole college got a half day on the feast of the diocesan patron, I had to watch from my room on the top floor of Coghill as the students got into their parents’ cars and disappeared around the sweep of the driveway.’

A sudden gust of wind threw up a shower of leaves that capered around the lights. Galvin and the others came across students who stopped to pass on the news that the rector was providing a television so that they could watch the opening ceremony of the Vatican Council.

‘I’ll guarantee you,’ one vowed, ‘it will shake up the Church in this country. Fasten your seatbelts, lads. Celibacy will be history in ten years.’ He drew heavily on a cigarette.

‘Not a day too soon.’ Mac rubbed his hands together. ‘We came at the right time, lads. I heard theologians are saying that mass will be in English, with the priest facing the congregation, and the congregation will be singing and making the responses.’

At the entrance to the ambulatory, they stopped to talk to Irwin. He swept his hand over the grounds. ‘The biggest garden party ever held in Ireland – ever held – was hosted here at the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. Did you know that? Cardinals from America and Australia. De Valera. The High Command was the brains behind the whole thing. Dev put in a word for him in Rome.’

As they headed back to Coghill House, Galvin remarked to Mac: ‘Irwin is great gas. Seems a nice fella.’

‘Irwin, oh yeah, great fun all right.’ Mac’s tone changed. He stopped and lowered his voice. ‘There’s another side to Irwin. Be careful. He’ll sell you down the river if you became a threat to him. I saw him make it hot and heavy for a lad who wanted to get one of the free places with the Lourdes pilgrimage he’d earmarked for himself. He can be a right bastard.’

The sound of the bell ringing out across the lawn caused a quick end to the conversation. ‘Come on, lads,’ said Mac. ‘The Phantom might be hiding under the stairs.’

In the oratory, which smelt of fresh linoleum, Galvin knelt at the front with the other first years and tried to pray, but the newness of everything had his head in a spin. Stepping off the train with his parents at Kingsbridge, driving in a taxi up O’Connell Street, crowds, double-decker buses, Nelson’s Pillar. His mother, who had never wanted him to enter a seminary, had been sullen. His father had stretched his scrawny neck to admire the decorated ceiling of the Academy Hall and rummaged in the inside pocket of his jacket for the safety pin that secured the college fee; his country accent had caused women in tweeds and diamond rings to turn their heads and smile to one another.

The senior prefect announced that they would join in prayer ‘so that the Holy Spirit will guide His Holiness and the bishops assembled in Rome for the Council’. He nodded to a student sitting at an organ to the side of the altar. Irwin and others rushed around with armfuls of hymnals. The heavy swell of the organ led them into song and the oratory filled with the sound of 140 spirited voices:

Veni Creator Spiritus,

Mentes tuorum visita,

imple superna gratia

quae tu creasti, pectora.

During the period of reflection, squelching footsteps approached from the back. The rector genuflected in front of the altar, bowed his grey head and knelt to pray the ‘Our Father’ in Latin. When he unhooked the gold chain at the neck of his long black cloak with its velvet collar, Winters rushed to take it from him. The rector sat at a baize-covered table and welcomed everyone again, especially the first years. He hoped that the rest of the student body had had ‘a refreshing holiday’.

He opened the rule book and put on a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. ‘The rules are for your own good, gentlemen,’ he said with a lisp. ‘To make you into good priests and to join the generations of men who have gone out from this seminary to save souls.’

After reading aloud a page or two, he stopped, removed his glasses and looked around. ‘Does anyone here know the most important rule of all? That which is the distinguishing mark of the good priest?’ He paused. ‘I will give the freshmen the opportunity of answering first.’

‘Is it saying his prayers, father?’ One of the first years, who was sitting in the front seat next to Galvin, spoke with such innocence that a titter spread through the oratory.

The rector’s mandarin eyes looked around for another answer. ‘Yes, that is a sine qua non. Good man. But even more important ...’ the smile was now deserting him, ‘I want this implanted in your minds: the most important rule is obedience. What you have to remember is that the voice of God is mediated through the seminary authorities, who are subject to His Grace the Archbishop. Another important rule – a corollary of the first – is loyalty to the archdiocese. Loyalty, gentlemen. All the men who have gone out of this seminary have been loyal.’

The rules covered all aspects of their daily lives in the seminary, including raising one’s biretta when passing a statue and behaviour at university. ‘You shall show politeness at all times to lay students while at university college, but you shall not linger with them or engage in idle gossip. This applies also when you happen upon students with whom you were in school, or even family members.’ The rector paused, and flicked one side of the soutane cape over his shoulder so that the satin lining showed. ‘Remember custody of the eyes. Before going out to the university, you will assemble in the oratory with your prefect, who will lead the prayer for purity.’

He continued in a solemn tone. ‘One rule that is strictly enforced: on no account shall a student ever enter another student’s room. I enjoin you gentlemen, never, ever to break that rule.’

He knelt again at the foot of the altar. A prefect rushed across with his cloak and held the gold chain for the rector to clasp around his pink neck. Then he recited another Latin prayer before squelching out.

The common room was so crowded for the viewing of the Vatican Council that some had to stand at the back. Winters switched off the lights as the newsreader announced that they were now going over to St Peter’s in Rome.

A hush descended; a communion of expectant faces reflected the flickering movements from the screen as the assembly watched an endless procession of bishops, vested in flowing robes and mitres, walking with great dignity past the Egyptian obelisk of the Bernini piazza and ascending the steps leading to St Peter’s Basilica. In a solemn tone, the commentator named some far-off places where the bishops were serving and recalled other Councils of the Church. The Pope, carried high on his throne, appeared and blessed the cheering crowd. The commentator fell silent so all could hear the burst of sound from the organ. The loud applause of the thousands gathered in St Peter’s Square was like the crack of a rifle shot in the dry air. Inside the basilica, the Pope dismounted from his throne and made his way between the tiers of bishops stretching the entire length of the nave until he reached his place at the twisted bronze columns supporting the canopy. Here, with clouds of smoke rising from swinging thuribles and filling the sanctuary, he intoned the opening liturgy.

When the broadcast was over, one of the prefects broke the spell by switching on the lights.

‘Now you will go in silent procession to the oratory for night prayer.’ His tone was flinty. ‘And you will pray especially for the Holy Father and the bishops gathered in conclave.’

After praying for the Holy Father and the bishops, everyone went as bidden to their rooms. A succession of doors closing sounded along the corridors before the seminary settled down for the night. Like a child on Christmas Eve, too excited to sleep, Galvin’s head was filled with images of the Council: he felt he could reach out and touch the hope inspired by the reassuring face of the elderly Pope. His scattered dreams that night, however, were not about the twisted bronze columns and the Pope with the homely look, but about London and the summer just gone, when he had worked side by side with men hired by his brother: M.J.’s laughing face glistening with sweat as he hopped off the old army jeep he used to rush from site to site. Whipping up bags of cement in his powerful arms and shouting good-humouredly at one of his men: ‘Move your arse, lad, we’ve houses to build!’ Galvin himself, pushing loaded wheelbarrows up planks to plasterers and bricklayers. And dancing in the Galtymore Ballroom with Maureen from Claremorris whom he had kissed and fondled down a dimly lit lane across from the dancehall.

Galvin was a good student. He kept the rules and gained some respect from his ability on the football field and as ‘a cute hoor from the country who took it all in and said little’. Every morning, along with seventy or so students, he cycled to the university in Earlsfort Terrace.

If he was strolling around the grounds with others or playing snooker, the Abbeyfeale youth hung steadily at his shoulder, content to hover on the edge, and he seemed satisfied with the small change that fell from their conversations. One afternoon when he was watching a rugby game and saw a scrum for the first time, he burst out laughing. ‘Lads, aren’t they like pigs feeding at a trough? Now aren’t they?’

The comment was passed around in the common room and by evening they were snorting like pigs every time they met the lad in the corridor and sniggering at Compline when someone did a pig impression. ‘Muck-Muck’ they began to call him and, like a group of lions converging on a lone zebra, they began to close in.

One morning the lad from Abbeyfeale sidled up to Galvin and asked him to go for a walk; there was something he wanted to tell him.

‘I’d like to be a priest, Tommy,’ he said when they were out of hearing distance of those who were leaning against the columns of Beresford’s Folly, smoking cigarettes or pipes, ‘and one day say mass for my mother’s soul. But I’m in the wrong place. I know that now.’ He was near to tears. ‘Maybe I’ll apply to one of the other seminaries down the country where I’d be among people like myself.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Galvin said. ‘Sure, if you give it time, you might settle down. I wouldn’t mind some of those bastards that were getting at you. That will pass. Take no notice and they’ll stop.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘This place is too stand-offish. The other day I met a priest on the corridor and I said: “Hello, father, isn’t it a lovely day?” He had a sneer on his oul face, and looked at me as if I were a dog that had strayed into the house.’

Galvin stopped and turned to him. ‘Lookit, they don’t salute any of us, except the chosen few, but you have to ignore that if you want to be a priest. ’

The Abbeyfeale lad left in early November, just before dinner, when the students were in the oratory for Particular Examination of Conscience, a midday review of any sins they might have committed since morning. On the way down the avenue with his suitcase and his bicycle, he pitched his soutane onto one of the laurel trees. The students cycling out to university passed it every morning until the Phantom asked Paddy to remove it.

Dark evenings invaded the grounds. Leaves began to rot, so that the bare branches of the tall trees stood like membranes against the sky. By Christmas, three of the first years had left. One had begun to have agonizing migraine attacks. To each of them, the Phantom issued the standard instructions: ‘You will pack your bags, say a brief word of goodbye to your class fellows and leave quietly while everyone is at study. Do not delay.’ They left behind empty rooms with rolled-up mattresses and wire coat hangers on the iron bedstead.

Once the excitement of the early days had worn off, Galvin’s recurring anxiety returned, a condition that had flared up in adolescence. He had thought that going to St Paul’s would cure him, but, instead, when he switched off his bedside lamp at night, he couldn’t sleep for a couple of hours. He needed to talk to someone but feared that if he told the spiritual director, he might be asked to leave. Nevertheless, he couldn’t go on like this.

One night during study time when rain was lashing against his window he went downstairs along the stone corridor and knocked on the spiritual director’s door, half hoping that the priest would be out and he’d be saved the ordeal of facing up to his troubles.

‘Yes.’ The voice from within sounded peevish. Nevertheless, he turned the door knob and stepped inside. The spiritual director was using a screwdriver to open the back of a transistor radio. A two-bar heater glowed at his side. With the screwdriver, he indicated a seat in front of his desk.

‘Yes, young man.’ He continued to work on the radio, turning the knobs and putting it up to his ear. ‘Talk to me.’

‘My nerves, father. I’m having strange dreams.’

The spiritual director stopped and looked at Galvin. ‘Ah, sure, don’t we all have trouble with our nerves. Sure, that’s nothing to be put out about.’ He returned to his poking. ‘Tell me more, my son.’

Galvin stumbled through a story about his younger brother’s death; all the while the spiritual director kept moving the dial and fiddling with the screwdriver until the radio began to croak and splutter, then cleared. Nat King Cole’s smoky voice filled the room: ‘Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue, It isn’t very hard to do … .’

‘Ah good,’ the spiritual director said and lowered the volume. ‘Give me one more minute now. A test run.’ He eased the tuner into another position. ‘And you’ll find happiness without an end, whenever you pretend … .’

‘Good. Now then, Mr Galvin. Some men who come to St Paul’s … hmm, worry too much about their vocation. Are you eating well and getting on with your class?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Do you play football?’

‘I love football, father.’

Through milk-bottle lenses that magnified his pale eyes, the spiritual director smiled at him. ‘Ah, just worrying too much. You’ll make a fine priest. Oh, I’d have no fears about you at all. Noneat all. And, yes … hmm, it is very sad the way your poor little brother died. Offer it up, Thomas, for the most forgotten soul in purgatory. Good man.’

Galvin’s step was lighter when he walked back to his room, but after a week or so the nightmares began again. This time he plucked up courage to climb the stairs to Murtagh’s room, where students were waiting for permission to take the bus to the university. His heart was pounding when it came to his turn, but he knocked and was called in.

‘What do you want?’ the Phantom asked, not taking his eyes off a sheaf of lecture notes. ‘To take the bus like the others … wasting my time?’

‘I’d like to see a psychiatrist, Dr Murtagh,’ he said, standing in front of the desk.