On a certain Friday or Saturday evening, the chief character’s binoculars were lying in readiness on the floor of the bathroom of the upstairs flat but all of the young men gathered in the flat were drinking beer in the lounge-room and watching some or another television program. At a certain point in the evening, according to the narrator of the abandoned work of fiction, the young men found themselves watching images of bishops or cardinals or high-ranking personages of the Catholic Church while some or another religious ceremony was taking place. Several times, while the young men watched, the image of one or another personage was seen to close its eyes and to bow its head for a few moments. After the second or third occasion when an image had appeared thus, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat began to jeer at the images of the personages.
The young man who jeered was one of two persons in the room who had attended a Catholic secondary school but had later ceased to call themselves Catholics. The other such person was the chief character. The young man who jeered looked while he jeered in the direction of the chief character. The young man then left off jeering and asked a question of the chief character as though he might have been the only person in the room who could answer the question. The young man asked what it was that Catholic bishops and priests and members of religious orders saw or affected to see whenever they closed their eyes during religious ceremonies.
The chief character of the work of fiction that would never be completed gave some or another flippant answer to the young man who had jeered at the images, but he, the chief character, was not comfortable. This was not because he was in any way sympathetic to the personages whose images had appeared just then on the television screen but because he himself, a few years before, had often closed his eyes and bowed his head during religious ceremonies. The chief character and the young man who jeered had sat in the same classroom during their final year of secondary education. The jeerer had failed his matriculation examination and had then gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to find a young woman who would live with him without first having married him. The chief character had passed his matriculation examination and had then gone to live in a building of two storeys among mostly grassy countryside, which building was the novitiate of a religious order of priests. The chief character had lived for only twelve weeks in the building of two storeys and had then returned to his parents’ home in a suburb of Melbourne. Soon afterwards, he had gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to write poetry or prose fiction. On the evening when his former classmate had jeered at the images on the television screen, the chief character had suspected that his former classmate was jeering at him — not as though the chief character still prayed or still attended religious ceremonies but as though his staying alone in his room during most evenings and his trying to write poetry or prose fiction was his way of closing his eyes against the real world for the sake of something illusory. The chief character could not have defended himself if he had been thus jeered at. Moreover, he suspected already that he was far from being the sort of writer who could include, years later, in one of his works a scene, so to call it, in which a fictional writer avenged himself against a fictional jeerer.
Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another report of one or another person’s having been paid a sum of money by one or another diocese or religious order of the Catholic Church for the reason that the person had been sexually assaulted by some or another Catholic pastor or teacher. On one or another of the evenings mentioned above, the young man who was reported above as having jeered at images of Catholic clergymen announced to the other persons gathered in the young man’s upstairs flat that he intended to take legal action against the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne and against the orders of religious brothers and nuns that had taught him. The grounds for his legal action were going to be that his various parish priests and teachers had set back his intellectual development by ten years and more; they had filled his mind with legends and superstitions instead of useful knowledge. (Even if the persons in the upstairs flat had not been drinking beer for several hours, none of them would have supposed the young man to be talking seriously. Any sort of legal action against the Catholic Church would have seemed preposterous folly in the early 1960s, even though certain priests and religious teachers were perpetrating during those years some of the sexual assaults that gave rise to criminal charges and out-of-court settlements in later years.)
The sum of money that the young man was going to demand from the Catholic Church was the equivalent in today’s currency of about twenty million dollars. When his listeners asked how he would spend such a sum, the young man answered them in detail.
Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another advertisement offering for sale one or another building of two or even three storeys that had formerly been a convent for an order of nuns or a monastery for an order of Catholic priests in some or another town in the countryside of Victoria. At the time when the young man in the upstairs flat began to explain how he would spend the equivalent of twenty million dollars, it would have seemed preposterous to suppose that any convent or monastery in any town in the countryside of Victoria would ever be offered for sale, and yet the young man predicted that the Catholic Church, which was then a flourishing organisation, would soon begin to be less than flourishing and that convents and monasteries would soon be offered for sale. The young man explained to the other persons in the upstairs flat that he would use part of the proceeds of his legal action as the purchase-price of a building of two or even three storeys in the countryside of Victoria, which building had been formerly a monastery or a convent.
When the young man who lived in the upstairs flat first mentioned a monastery or a convent, and whenever he afterwards talked about such a building, the chief character saw in his mind one or another detail of an image of a two-storey building of bluestone that he had seen twice only, on a certain Saturday when he had attended a race-meeting for the first time. The chief character had been taken to and from the race-meeting by a paternal uncle who lived in a coastal city in the south-west of Victoria. The race-meeting had been held some twenty miles inland from the coastal city, at a racecourse that was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside with trees in the distance. Between some of the trees were the roofs of buildings in a small town. The tallest of these buildings was a convent belonging to an order of teaching nuns. The chief character had only twice glimpsed the convent through the windows of his uncle’s motor-car but he, the chief character, had noted several dormer windows above the level of the upper-storey windows. He had asked his uncle whether the windows were mere ornaments or whether each window had behind it a cell-like room where one or another nun read or prayed or slept of an evening. The uncle first told the chief character that any male person who went beyond the hallway and the front parlour of the convent earned the penalty of immediate excommunication. The uncle then said that the nuns in the convent in the small town took in as boarders a few older girls from districts further inland. Perhaps each of these older girls, so the uncle said, was allotted a comfortable attic room with a window overlooking grassy countryside and part of a distant racecourse.
One of the conditions of his buying the convent or monastery, so the young man told his listeners in the upstairs flat, was that all the furnishings and fittings should be sold to him. He would be especially concerned to have the chapel handed over to him with its altar and tabernacle intact and the sacristy with its cupboards full of vestments and so-called sacred vessels. If possible, he would buy also the robes or the habits worn by the priests or the nuns who had formerly lived in the building. After having acquired the building, he would arrange for part of the first floor to be turned into a luxuriously appointed apartment for himself and the woman who lived with him. The rest of the first floor would be turned into many smaller apartments, each of which would be occupied, so the young man said, by a high-class call-girl. The upper floors would be converted into spacious apartments to be occupied permanently, or at weekends, by each of the young men who had visited him on the many Friday and Saturday evenings when he had been no more than a clerk who worked in a building of many storeys and who lived in an upstairs flat. One of these young men, of course, would have been the chief character.