‘Now I’m sorry Blanchie but I must be off. I have a party of visiting Italians to collect from the airport, guests of the Papal Nuncio. They’re flying in from Rome. Do you know Rome at all? I adore Rome. Quite apart from the obvious connections in our case, it is the most surprising, rejuvenating of cities.’
‘Gabriel, I cannot stay here. There must be another parish…’
‘If you ever go, I recommend to you the Piazza Navona, a square which should be everyone’s first glimpse of Rome, not even the tourists can ruin its perfect proportions…’
‘Another appointment —’
‘Another appointment? But this is your appointment and I am here to let you know that Bishop Blashford confirms you in this appointment. There is nowhere for you to be but here. Nowhere to go but back, back to Pennyheaven, this time for an indefinite stay.’
Blanchaille watched him walking down the garden path. The protesting parishioners cheered when he approached. Gabriel doffed his hat, waved cheerily to them and was gone.
Blanchaille phoned Lynch. The old priest cackled at the news of the visit. The electronic eavesdroppers chirruped and squawked along with him.
‘Speak up, Blanchie, and keep it short. The line’s heavily and ineptly tapped. The bastards never worked out how to use the equipment they import in such quantities from America.’
‘I’m thinking of moving on.’
‘Good. Knew you would come to your senses one day. Perhaps we should have a few words. Where are you?’
Blanchaille told him.
‘My God, right in the sticks. What’s that noise? I can hear people shouting.’
‘Those are my parishioners. I’m under siege.’
Lynch’s laughter was drowned in a shriek of static.
And I saw in my dream how Blanchaille’s stay in the new periurban suburb of Merrievale as parish priest of the spanking-new church of St Peter-in-the-Wild had come to end in undignified confusion after just one month. The defection of his black housekeeper Joyce upset him particularly. She’d never got used to his arrival or the loss of the man he had replaced. How dreadfully unfavourably he must have compared with his predecessor, the youthful, energetic Syrian, Father Rischa. The Parish Consensus Committee had got to Joyce. They told her that Blanchaille was on his way out, they’d shown her the fatal mark of blood upon his lintel imprinted there by the Angel of Death who had passed that way and she’d shot off like a rabbit, an absolute winner in the Petrine stakes, in the thrice-crowing cock awards. Traitress. To hell with her!
St Peter-in-the Wild was Blanchaille’s first parish and his last. He hadn’t been there two minutes when the complaints began.
‘And what is the nature of your complaint, Mr Makapan?’
‘History,’ came the simple if unexpected reply from the brick salesman. ‘Not only your own particular history, but your lack of understanding of the historical process in general and of our parts in it.’
Blanchaille’s particular history — what was it? Unremarkable, really. A hostel boy, one-time altar server who had gone up to the seminary to become a priest. Why a priest? Because he wished to be like Father Lynch who understood the system of the Regime and sought to expose it. ‘You are not priestly material,’ Father Lynch had cautioned. ‘You are raised with the puritan, primitive, moralising web of the system and cannot destroy it, but what you can do is to hunt down the guilty men and bring them to book. That is your real vocation. Blanchaille, the police college waits for you — answer the call!’
For once Lynch and the Bishop were in agreement. Blashford opposed his entry into the seminary and when the time came for Blanchaille’s ordination, continued to oppose it, avoiding the duty to perform the ceremony by being indisposed. Instead Blanchaille was ordained by a visiting Hungarian archbishop who was deported soon after the event for gross interference in the domestic affairs of the country. Blanchaille had long suspected Blashford’s hand behind the expulsion. Newly ordained, his first visit to Lynch had been disastrous. Lynch had stood him up in the pulpit and introduced him to the congregation as ‘the boy you might remember having served at this altar for many a year, and is now a policeman engaged in important undercover work in the country, hence his disguise…’
Blanchaille had done no parish work. After six years of moral theology mixed with intense sexual agonies in the seminary, applying the purity paddle (a miniature ping-pong bat without the usual rubber facings) with a short, downward slap morning and night, whenever his errant member stiffened beneath his soutane, he went to work in the transit camps, the garbage heaps where the human rubbish, the superfluous appendages were thrown away; the huge shanty towns in the remote and barren veld set aside by the Regime as temporary homes for a variety of black people: there were in the camps the dependants, wives, children, grandparents of black workers in the cities; there were illegal immigrants who had taken work in the cities without proper papers; there were the aged, infirm and unemployable who had failed to fulfil the requirements of their contracts; there were shattered black communities which had been living, either by historical accident or with illegal intent, in areas designated as being for other ethnic groups, tribes, races, clans, formations laid down according to the principles of Ethnic Autonomy.
When Blanchaille went to the camps no one had heard of them, or of him. Soon everyone had heard of him. ‘Father Theo of the Camps’ the newspapers called him. Bishop Blashford warned him to avoid political involvement. Later Blashford was to call on Catholics to ‘embrace the suffering Christ of the camps’ and the Church moved in with force. But by that time Blanchaille had gone, had written his notorious letter to The Cross with its ringing phrase ‘Charity Kills’, in which he called for the camps to be bulldozed. As a result he had been transferred for ‘rest and recuperation’ in a spirit of ‘loving brotherly concern’, and under heavy guard, to the place called Pennyheaven.
Pennyheaven was an imposing country mansion of tall white fluted columns and heavy sash windows, red polished verandas, great oak floorboards a foot across, balding peacocks, an empty dry and cracked swimming pool, a conservatory where lizards basked, pressed against the bleary Victorian stained-glass windows. It had belonged once to Sam Giltstein, an old drinking buddy of Barney Barnato’s. An individual, this Giltstein. When many of the Jewish mining magnates went over to Christianity early in the century, Gilstein, perverse as ever, resisted the movement into the Anglican faith and opted instead for the Church of Rome. When he died he left his inaccessible summer place in the high remote mountains thirty miles north of the capital, to the Church as a ‘home for homeless clergy’. Many miles from the nearest village and halfway up the rocky mountainside at the end of an almost inaccessible dirt road, Pennyheaven had remained as remote and as distant from human habitation as Giltstein had intended it to be. No one visited Pennyheaven. To go there you had to be sent. To leave you had to be fetched.
Blanchaille was six weeks there waiting for his new posting. To Pennyheaven came priests for whom no other place could be found: priests not bad enough to expel, not mad enough to confine; ancient clerics awaiting transfer to geriatric homes, little trembling creatures sitting out on the veranda from dawn to sunset, trembling and dribbling, leaning over their sticks and turning weak eyes on the shimmering blue peaks; dipsomaniacs and men with strange cravings for little girls.
Blanchaille met there Father Wüli, a huge Swiss who described himself as the last of the great African travellers, who had come ‘to rest in Pennyheaven between voyages of exploration’. What this in fact meant, Blanchaille discovered, was that Wüli was an inveterate escapee. He would stride miles across the mountains in his tough boots, his Swiss sense of direction carrying him to the outskirts of some town and there he would lurk among the rocks and kranses, leaping out to expose himself to terrified picnickers on the remote hillsides, his unerring compass on these prodigious treks, the needle that pointed him onward, leaping massively from his unzipped flies. Father Wüli would return from his distant journeys in a police landrover, blanketed against sudden display, looking very fit and quite unabashed.