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Anthony Burgess achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versatile. He was born in Manchester in 1917 and studied English at the university there. He served in the army between 1940 to 1956, and as a colonial education officer in Malaya and Borneo from 1954 to 1960, which provided the inspiration for The Malayan Trilogy. In 1959 Burgess was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour and he decided to try to live by writing. He wrote over fifty books, scripts, translations, a Broadway musical, three symphonies and hundreds of book reviews. His novel, Earthly Powers, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980. Burgess was a Visiting Fellow of Princeton University and a Distinguished Professor of City College, New York. He was created a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French President and Commandeur de Merite Culturel by Prince Rainier of Monaco. His last novel, published in the spring of 1993, was A Dead Man in Deptford, based around the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

Anthony Burgess died in November 1993. In the tributes that followed The New York Times celebrated his ‘versatility and erudition’, Gore Vidal said, ‘The Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by the so much admired Evelyn Waugh’, David Lodge admired ‘his tireless energy and fertility of invention’ and John Updike praised his ‘energy and the wide-ranging interests of a dozen writers . . . He seemed not only a prodigious intellect, but an affectionate spirit whose mind, like Ariel’s, circled the globe in a few seconds.’

About the Book

Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; Don Carlo Campanati is a man of God, a shrewd manipulator who rises through the Vatican to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. These two men are linked not only by family ties but by a common understanding of mankind’s frailties. In this epic masterpiece, Anthony Burgess plumbs the depths of the essence of power and the lengths men will go for it.

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Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess

IT WAS THE afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

‘Very good, Ali,’ I quavered in Spanish through the closed door of the master bedroom. ‘Take him into the bar. Give him a drink.’

I retired twelve years ago from the profession of novelist. Nevertheless you will be constrained to consider, if you know my work at all and take the trouble now to reread that first sentence, that I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening. But there is really nothing of contrivance about it. Actuality sometimes plays into the hands of art. That I was eighty-one I could hardly doubt: congratulatory cables had been rubbing it in all through the forenoon. Geoffrey, who was already pulling on his overtight summer slacks, was, I supposed, my ganymede or male lover as well as my secretary. The Spanish word arzobispo certainly means archbishop. The time was something after four o’clock on a Maltese June day – the twenty-third, to be exact and to spare the truly interested the trouble of consulting Who’s Who.

Geoffrey sweated too much and was running to fat (why does one say running? Geoffrey never ran). The living, I supposed, was too easy for a boy of thirty-five. Well, the time for our separation could not, in the nature of things, be much longer delayed. Geoffrey would not be pleased when he attended the reading of my will. ‘The old bitch, my dear, and all I did for him.’ I would do for him too, though posthumously, posthumously.

I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not. Geoffrey put on his sandals puffing, creasing his stomach into three bunches of fat, and then his flowery coatshirt. Finally he hid himself behind his sunglasses, which were of the insolent kind whose convexities flash metallic mirrors at the world. I observed my eighty-one-year-old face and neck quite clearly in them: the famous ancient grimness of one who had experienced life very keenly, the unfleshed tendons like cables, the anatomy of the jaws, the Fribourg and Treyer cigarette in its Dunhill holder relating me to an era when smoking had been an act to be performed with elegance. I looked without rancour on the double image while Geoffrey said:

‘I wonder what his archbishship is after. Perhaps he’s delivering a bull of excommunication. In a gaudy gift wrapper, of course.’

‘Sixty years too late,’ I said. I handed Geoffrey the halfsmoked cigarette to stub out in one of the onyx ashtrays, and I noticed how he begrudged even that small service. I got out of bed, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated. My summer slacks were, following nominal propriety, far from tight. The shirt of begonias and orchids was ridiculous on a man of my age, but I had long drawn the fang of Geoffrey’s sneers by saying: ‘Dear boy, I must habituate myself to the prospect of reverential infloration.’ That phrase dated back to 1915. I had heard it in Lamb House, Rye, but it was less echt Henry James than Henry James mocking echt Meredith. He was remembering 1909 and some lady’s sending Meredith too many flowers. ‘Reverential infloration, ho ho ho,’ James had mocked, rolling in mock mirth.

I did not care at all for the aspirated stress Geoffrey laid on the word. It connoted sex and his own shameless infidelities; it was a word I had once used to him weeping; it carried for me a traditional moral seriousness that was no more than a camp joke to Geoffrey’s generation.

‘The faithful,’ I aspirated back, ‘are not supposed to read my books. Not here, on St Paul’s holy island. Here I am immoral and anarchic and agnostic and rational. I think I can guess what the archbishop wants. And he wants it precisely because I am all of those things.’

‘Clever old devil, aren’t you?’ His mirrors caught golden stone from the Triq Il-Kbira, meaning Street the Big or Main Street, outside the open casement. I said:

‘There is much neglected correspondence down below in what you call your office. Sickened by your sloth, I took it upon myself to open a letter or two, hot from the hands of the mailman. One of them bore a Vatican stamp.’

‘Ah, fuck you,’ Geoffrey smiled, or seemed to: I could not, of course, see his eyes. Then he mocked my slight lisp: ‘Thickened by your thloth.’ Then he said ‘Fuck you’ again, this time sulkily.

‘I think,’ I said, hearing the senile dry wavering and hating it, ‘I’d better sleep alone in future. It would be seemly at my age.’

‘Why,’ I trembled at the big blue wall mirror, brushing back my scant strands, ‘do you make things sound mean and dirty? Warmth. Comfort. Love. Are those dirty words? Love, love. Is that dirty?’

‘Matters of the heart,’ Geoffrey said, seeming to smile again. ‘We must watch that rather mature pump, must we not? Very well. Each of us sleeps in his sundered bed. And if you cry out in the night, who will hear you?’

Wer, wenn ich schriee. . . . Who had said or written that? Of course, poor great dead Rilke. He had cried in my presence in a low beershop in Trieste, not far from the Aquarium. The tears had flowed mostly from his nose, and he had wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘You have always managed to sleep soundly enough at my labouring side,’ I said. ‘Soundly enough not to be sensible even of the sharp prodding of my finger.’ And then, quavering shamefully: ‘Faithful, faithful.’ I was ready to weep again, the word was so loaded. I remembered poor Winston Churchill, who, at about my present age, would weep at words like greatness. It was called emotional lability, a disease of the senile.

Geoffrey did not mouth a smile now, nor set his jaw in weak truculence. The lower part of his face showed a sort of compassion, the upper the twin and broken me. Poor old bugger, he would be saying to himself and, later perhaps, to some friend or toady in the bar of the Corinthia Palace Hotel, poor senile decrepit lonely old impotent sod. To me, with kind briskness: ‘Come, dear. Your fly is properly fastened? Good.’

‘Splendid. Let us then put on the mask of distinguished immoral author. His archbishship awaits.’ And he opened the heavy door which led straight into the airy upper salon. At my age I could, can, take any fierce amount of light and heat, and both these properties of the South roared in, like a Rossini finale in stereophony, from the open and unshuttered casements. To the right were the housetops and gaudy washing of Lija, a passing bus, quarrelling children; to the left, beyond crystal and statuary and the upper terrace, the hiss and pump hum came up of the irrigation of my orange and lemon trees. In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort. We trod cool marble, heavy white bear fur, marble, fur, marble. Over there was the William Foster harpsichord, which I had bought for my former friend and secretary, Ralph, faithless, some of its middle strings broken one night in a drunken tantrum by Geoffrey. On the walls were paintings by my great contemporaries – now fabulously valuable but all acquired cheap when, though still young, I had emerged from struggle. There were cases showing off jade, ivory, glass, metal bibelots or objets d’art. How the French terms, admitting their triviality, somehow cleansed them of it. The tangible fruits of success. The real fight, the struggle with form and expression, unwon.

Oh, my God – the real fight? I was thinking like an author, not like a human, though senile, being. As though conquering language mattered. As if, at the end of it all, there were anything more important than clichés. Faithful. You have failed to be faithful. You have lapsed, or fallen, into infidelity. I believe that a man should be faithful to his beliefs. O come all ye faithful. That could still evoke tearful nostalgia at Christmas. The reproduction in my father’s surgery of that anecdotal horror – no, who was I to say it was a horror?: the wide-eyed soldier at his post while Pompeii fell. Faithful unto death. The felicitations of the faithful, then. The world of the homosexual has a complex language, brittle yet sometimes excruciatingly precise, fashioned out of the clichés of the other world. So, cher maître, these are the tangible fruits of your success.

Geoffrey shuffled into step with me, mockingly, as if to emphasize his, my dear, role of aide de camp. Side by side, tread by tread, in comic neatness, we descended the first marble flight. We arrived at a spacious landing with a Jacobean cupboard in which exquisite glassware hid – for Use, dear, for actually imbibing out of from to – and an eighteenth-century chess table permanently set with men of Mexican obsidian (for show only, dear – his playing days are done), then turned right to engage the final marbled cataract. I looked at the gilt Maltese clock on the wall of the stairwell. It said nearly three.

‘Nobody’s come to repair it,’ I said, hearing my petulance. ‘It’s been three days now. Not, of course, that it really matters.’

We were three steps from the bottom. Geoffrey tapped the clock as if it were a barometer, then viciously mimed a punch at it. He said:

‘We could have gone somewhere else. There are other islands if it’s islands you bloody want.’

‘We could bloody well have stayed in Tangier. We could have got the better of the bastards.’

‘You could have damned well done something. Faithful Don’t use that bloody word faithful to me.’

‘Why to this bloody place? Bloody priests and police working hand in bloody hand.’

‘A man has to die somewhere, Geoffrey. Malta seems to me a reasonable kind of compromise.’

I minced the three treads down to the hall, and he followed, damning and bloodying now merely under his breath. Three steps away, on a silver salver, blessed by a Chinese bowl full of flowers of the season, lay a fresh batch of felicitations brought by Cable and Wireless motor cyclists. The bar was across the hall, to the right, between the wreck of an office where Geoffrey neglected his secretarial work and my own fussily neat study. On the wall between the bar and the study was the Georges Rouault – a scrawled ugly ballerina, impatient thick black strokes and bitter washes. In Paris that time Maynard Keynes had hotly recommended that I buy it. He had known all about markets.

HIS GRACE WAS quite at his ease in the bar. I had expected to find him sitting fidgeting at one of the tables with an untouched orange squash before him, but here he was perched at the counter on a fawn leather stool, neat little foot on the rail, neat little fat hand holding what looked like a neat scotch. He was talking loudly and affably with Ali – who, whitecoated, stood behind as bartender – in, to my astonishment, Ali’s own language. Was this a gift of the Pentecostal paraclete? Then I remembered that Maltese and Moghrabi Arabic were sister dialects. His Grace began to climb down from his stool when he saw me, smiling and greeting in English:

‘To meet you at last, Mr Toomey. A privilege and a pleasure. I know I speak for the whole community when I wish you, as I do now, very many happy returns.’

A swarthy young man in a plainer clerical habit than his superior’s shouted from the far corner: ‘Happy birthday, sir, yes. It is an honour to wish it to you in person.’ The bar was small and there was no need to shout, but some of the Maltese use an abnormally high voice level even when whispering. He had been looking at my framed photographs on the walls, all of me with various of the great – Chaplin in Los Angeles, Thomas Mann in Princeton, Gertrude Lawrence at the close of one of my long London runs, H. G. Wells (with, of course, Odette Keun) at Lou Pidou, Ernest Hemingway on the Pilar off Key West. There were also framed posters of my stage successes – He Paid His Way, The Gods in the Garden, Oedipus Higgins, Break Break Break, others. Both clerics cheerfully raised their glasses at me. Then His Grace put his glass on the counter and ambled towards me somewhat slyly, his right hand raised horizontally at ringkissing level. I shook it.

The archbishop was a few years younger than myself, evidently vigorous though very plump; being plump, not much lined or wrinkled. We eyed each other with friendly wariness, opposed in trade but united in our generation. I noted, in my frivolous way, that we all made up a reasonable poker hand – two pairs, Ali discarded. I said to Ali in Spanish: ‘Gin and tonic. Then you can go.’

His Grace sat now at one of the three tables, draining his glass first then rocking it humorously in his hand. He was very much at home. This was, after all, his archdiocese. I said:

‘Oh yes,’ the chaplain cried, turning with eagerness from myself and Mae West outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, ‘tea would be very nice.’

‘Drinks,’ pronounced the archbishop. And he told Ali, in Maltese-Moghrabi, to give him the same again. Then, he seemed to say, Ali could go. ‘This lovely house,’ he said. ‘These lovely gardens and orchard. I have visited here often. In the time of Sir Edward Hubert Canning. In the time of the late Mrs Tagliaferro. Father Azzopardi, I know, would be very delighted to be shown all around or about it, everything, by Mr, by your young friend here with the mirrors on his eyes. The young, is it not, Mr Toomey? These young people. The house was, this you may not know or perhaps may know, it was built in 1798 when Buonaparte invaded. He sent the Knights away. He tried to restrict or constrict the powers of the clergy.’ His Grace chuckled grimly. ‘He did not succeed. The Maltese people would not have it. There were incidents. There were deaths.’

I took my gin and tonic from Ali and brought it to the table. I sat down opposite the archbishop, who had already been served with a large neat Claymore. ‘Well,’ I said to Geoffrey, ‘you have your instructions. Show his ah reverence round the house and gardens. Give him tea.’ Father Azzopardi drained his glass of whatever it was with nervous haste and began to cough. Geoffrey banged him on the back with excessive energy, saying at each stroke of his fist:

Geoffrey put out his tongue and led coughing Father Azzopardi off. His Grace made one final Semitic joke at Ali who too, laughing, went off. ‘A good boy,’ His Grace said, ‘one can see that. These young people,’ he added, nodding towards Geoffrey’s voice that could be heard, full of aspirated stresses, moving towards green and sunlight. And then: ‘You play bridge here, I should think. A room pleasantly appointed for the playing of bridge,’ his eyes on the shelves full of bottles. ‘A harmless and civilized pastime.’ He raised his fat hand in what seemed to be both a blessing on the game and a gesture of regret that he could not accept, ever, an invitation to come and play. ‘I played. I play no longer. I have far too much work. His late Holiness too played. And then he too had far too much work. This you will know.’ His modest smile was meant, I assumed, to diminish the comparison.

So, as I had been foretold in that Vatican letter, the visit was to be about His late Holiness. I said: ‘When Carlo was raised so high, his bridgeplaying days were already over. Far too much work, as you say, as he said. But he had been a superb player – very clever and fierce. Like Mrs Battle, you know.’

His Grace had not heard of the lady. ‘Ah yes, I can believe that. Clever and fierce. But also human, or is it humane? Perhaps both. But also a saint.’ He looked at me with small unwilling awe. Carlo, I had said.

I was ready to joke about there being no bridge saints, but that would have been cheap and unworthy. Instead, I said: ‘I know of the proposal, naturally. I gather there is still much to be done.’

His Grace waved the hand that was not holding his drink. ‘I speak, of course, of course –’

‘You are a master of the language, Mr Toomey. It will, I fear, be always a foreign language to me. The language of the Protestant, if you will forgive me. That you are a master is well known. I have little time, of course, for reading. I have been often told that you are a master of the English language.’

‘Something,’ I said, ‘that most Maltese must be content to be told. Those interested, I mean. They are forbidden to find out for themselves.’

‘Oh, one or two of your books are permitted. This I know. But our people must be protected, Mr Toomey. But I think that soon our censorship may be a little bit relaxed. There is a new spirit abroad, at home as well, aha. Already you may now buy the works freely of the atheist Monsieur Voltaire. In French, too.’

‘Deist, not atheist.’ I knew what he was here for, but I decided to use pretended ignorance to get a point in. ‘Archbishop,’ I said, ‘I take it you are not here in any shall I say pastoral capacity? You will know, I think, that I was born in the faith. But I propose to die out of it. I have lived long enough out of it. I ought to make my position absolutely dear.’ And yet I gulped on that faith.

‘You propose,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Man proposes.’ And then: ‘No no no, oh no. One thing I have learned, we are all learning. His late Holiness was, aha, very clever and fierce in teaching us all, one thing is that there are many ways to salvation. But let me put it this way to you, Mr Toomey. You know the Church. Whatever you are now, you are not a Protestant. Certain doctrines, words, terms – these have meaning for you. I am right, I think.’

‘Permit me to give you more whisky,’ I said, taking his glass and getting up, stiff, an old man. ‘Allow me to offer you a cigar. Or a cigarette.’

‘A lethal action, smoking,’ he said without irony. ‘Smoking makes the life shorter. Just a little drop, then.’ I took a cigarette for myself from the Florentine leatherbound box on the counter. There was also a huge wooden bowl from Central Africa full of matchbooks, trophies of the world’s airlines and hotels. I had toyed once with the notion of a travel book arranged on the aleatory taking out of matchbooks from this bowl, rather like filthy Norman Douglas’s autobiography based on the random selection of visiting cards. It had come to nothing. There is sense, however, in keeping a bowl full of such trophies: there are addresses and telephone numbers there, as well as a palpable record of travel helpful to an old man’s memory. I lighted my cigarette with a match from La Grande Scène, a restaurant at the top of the Kennedy Center in Washington, 833–8870. I could not for the life of me remember having been there. I puffed and shortened my life. Then I gave His Grace his whisky. He took it without thanks, a kind of intimacy. He said, as I sat down again:

‘Ah, that. Yes, well, I received a letter, a note rather, from my old bridgeplaying acquaintance Monsignor O’Shaughnessy.’

‘He mentioned the virtues of the personal approach. I see his point. Some things do not go well on paper. For all that, they seem to be building up a vast dossier of saintly evidence. A piece of evidence from a known apostate and selfproclaimed rationalist and agnostic would be of far greater value than the testimony of some superstitious old peasant woman in black. This is what Monsignor O’Shaughnessy’s note seemed to imply.’

His Grace swayed rather gracefully on his bottom, flashing his rings. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘he spoke when I was in Rome. It is strange, Mr Toomey, you must admit it, it is even bizarre, if that is the word – yourself, I mean. I mean a man who has rejected God – that is what they would say in the old days, now we are more careful – and yet had such close contacts with – I mean, you could write a book, is not that true?’

‘About Carlo? Ah, Your Grace, how do you know I haven’t? In any case, it would never get into Malta, would it – a book by Kenneth Marchal Toomey about the late Pope. It would be bound to be – well, not hagiography.’

‘Monsignor O’Shaughnessy mentioned to me that you have already written some little thing. You wrote it while he was still alive. Before he became what he at last became.’

‘I wrote a certain short story,’ I said. ‘About a priest who – look, my lord archbishop, you can read the story for yourself. It’s in my three volumes of collected stories. My secretary could hunt you out a copy.’

He looked at me. Was there bitterness there, was there shame? One should never say that one had no time for reading. It meant, with him, no time for my kind of irreligious trash. But there were times when even a great cleric should be prepared to do his homework. ‘Monsignor O’Shaughnessy,’ he mumbled in a very unMaltese manner, ‘telephoned to me yesterday, saying that he had read somewhere that it was your birthday today. That it was a good day for me to come. There was some article on you, he said, in an English newspaper.’

‘Last Sunday’s Observer. The article has not, officially speaking, been read by anyone in Malta. The reverse page carried a large article, copiously illustrated, on ladies’ swimwear. The censors at Luqa Airport cut it out. They thus also cut out the little birthday article on myself. I received an uncensored copy through the British High Commission. In the bag, as they put it.’

‘Yes yes, I see. But our people must be protected. But some of these men with their scissors at the airport are not of the most educated. However, there it is.’

‘While we’re on the subject, I may as well tell you that the General Post Office in Valletta have, after some trouble, kindly allowed me to have a copy of the poems of Thomas Campion that was sent to me, a limited edition of some value. They said that they had at last discovered that Thomas Campion was a great English martyr, so it must be all right.’

‘No, not good. The great English martyr was Edmund, not Thomas. Thomas Campion wrote some rather dirty little songs. Clean songs too, of course, but some quite erotic.’

He nodded and nodded, not displeased. Something or other, my agnostic depravity probably, was confirmed from my own mouth. He seemed unabashed at his ignorance of English martyrology.

‘Well, now, that is very interesting. But it is the other thing we are concerned about.’ He was right, the conversational economy of the confessional against the author’s tendency to divagate. ‘And, of course, to wish you a happy birthday yet again.’ He toasted me, smiling plumply. Absentmindedly, I toasted myself.

‘Monsignor O’Shaughnessy says that you are said to have said in some interview or somewhere about there not being any doubt of the miracle. That you witnessed it. And so I am to offer you every facility to set down, to write, to make some little –’

He played an invisible concertina for two seconds. ‘Your mastery of the language. Canonization. Miracles. It is the usual thing. Your Thomas More, man of all seasons. Joan of Arc.’

‘In what way are you to offer me every facility? I have paper, a pen, a sort of memory. Ah, I think I know what is meant. I am not to put off doing it. I am to be prodded. The saintmaking is somewhat urgent.’

I smiled at him, seeing my jawed grimness in the fine old mirror over the bar, a genuine antique that advertised Sullivan’s Whiskey. ‘So I, who don’t believe in saints, am involved in the making of a saint. Very piquant. Bizarre, to use your own term.’

‘It is surely only a matter of the fact. It is not even a matter of you using the word miracle. It is a matter of you saying that you saw something that could not by normal means be explained.’ He seemed to be growing bored already with his assignment, but suddenly a spark of professional concern animated his brown, droll eyes. ‘And yet surely miracle is the only word for what is seen clearly to be happening but cannot be explained except, except –’

‘– As the intervention of some force unknown to common sense or to science.’

‘Not altogether. The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It’s just a matter of waiting.’

‘But this. It was in a hospital somewhere, was it not? And the doctors had despaired of the life of whoever it was? Yes?’

‘It happened a long time ago,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know whether you, Your Grace, would understand this, but writers of fiction often have difficulty in deciding between what really happened and what they imagine as having happened. That is why, in my sad trade, we can never be really devout or pious. We lie for a living. This, as you can imagine, makes us good believers – credulous, anyway. But it has nothing to do with faith.’ I shut up; I could feel my voice beginning to crack on that word.

‘Aaaaah,’ he sighed. ‘But there will be witnesses other than yourself. People who do not lie for a living.’ What was meant to be a mere echo of my own words took on in his voice the tone of frivolous sin. ‘If you can get witnesses, it will be the better. There are hard men, you see, who must pretend that they do not want the canonization. They are called the advocates of the devil.’ That, too, sounded terrible.

‘Witnesses?’ I said. ‘Oh, heavens, it was so long ago. I honestly think you’d better go to some old peasant woman in black.’

‘No hurry,’ he said. His glass emptied, he got up. I got up with him. ‘You cannot be forced. You are to consider it, at least consider. That is all.’ He pointed his archepiscopal ring towards the picture gallery of myself and the great. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that he is not there.’ He had had a look at them then, a minor bit of homework, the cheating kind done in a rush in school just before the teacher comes in, seeking a picture of Voltaire and Christ together, smiling, godless artists and actresses all about.

‘That,’ I said with finicking care, ‘is a secular portrait gallery. Although there, you see, is Aldous Huxley.’ And I gestured at myself grim and the stoneeyed mescalin saint laughing.

‘Yes, yes.’ He did not seem to have heard of him. He beamed through the tall window at the garden scene: Father Azzopardi and Geoffrey taking tea together at a small green table under a white umbrella, Geoffrey talking and gesturing with animation, Father Azzopardi nodding, taking it all in. ‘These young people,’ said His Grace. And then, prodding my ribs very familiarly: ‘No hurry, I say. But still please regard the matter as urgent.’ One of those contradictions that come easily to the religious mind, God being quite as large as Walt Whitman.

THE GARDENERS KISSED his ring, the maids kissed his ring, Joey Grima the cook kissed his ring. Ali did not but was shaken hands with very cordially and treated to a final Semitic quip. And when Geoffrey and I escorted His Grace to his Daimler, which was parked by Percius’s Garage, the Triq Il-Kbira being narrow and my house possessing no forecourt, many villagers came running to kiss his ring – the two Borg sisters from the corner grocery, the entire staff of the police station opposite, an ancient squat known atheist in a flat cap who, all dusty, looked like some effigy from Malta’s palaeolithic past newly exhumed, embarrassed children pushed to it by their mothers, even the drivers and conductors of three converging buses whose passages the emerged Daimler blocked. I would now be thought better of in Lija and even neighbouring Attard and Balzan. The retired brigadier down the road who, so Geoffrey had told me, despised me as a man grown rich on the writing of filthy yarns, was not so graced by archepiscopal visitations. Geoffrey was saying, too loudly, to Father Azzopardi:

‘We could arrange a private showing for you. We have all the gear here. You’ll never see it in the public cinemas. But for Christ’s sake don’t tell the archbish.’ Father Azzopardi laughed terribly heartily. To me His Grace said:

‘I’ll be happy to see your deposition then. Mastery of the English language. Many happy birthdays once more. And please tell your young friend to be careful.’ No fool, then: he did not miss much. Father Azzopardi got in front with the driver, His Grace waved and blessed from the dead middle of the rear cushions, and the holy car sped soundlessly towards, say, Birkirkara.

‘Poor young swine,’ Geoffrey said as we went indoors. ‘I told him all about copulating priests and nuns in hot pants in the States. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. What was it all about then?’

‘Don’t be silly, Geoffrey. You forget certain facts of my biography, if you ever, which I am inclined to doubt, knew them.’

‘Did, did he? I see. Highly honoured. Has his bulldogs sniffing round Strait Street, does he? Oh Jesus Lucifer Beelzebub Almighty, how I loathe and detest this bloody place.’

‘You mean, I think, that there is no decent tradition of Islamic pederasty here. The whole place is dedicated to good Catholic family making. It is also, you would say, excessively hippy and bosomy. No dirty little boys with bodies like straight sharp knives.’

‘You fucking hypocrite.’ He said this with little malice and followed it with a snigger. ‘None of that, eh? You must accompany me to the Gut sometime, dear.’

‘I see, I see.’ We walked out into the garden with its fine high thick walls, walls built by men used to sieges. ‘I think the archbishop was right to ask me to ask you to watch your step,’ I said.

I said, as we strolled down a shaded path, seeing the three cats play ambushes: ‘You know, Geoffrey, if you’re really unhappy –’

‘Yes yes, dear. Percy in the Bahamas would be only too ready to have me, and there’s Frank palpitating for friendship in Lausanne. The vicariously literary life of Geoff Enright, or from pillow to post office among the expatriate masters.’ He kicked a pruned twig out of his path. ‘I suppose, though, I have been just a bit wayward. The mail’s piling up, as I am well aware. There are probably one or two royalty cheques lying under the scum. But tomorrow morning – early – on the stroke of ten – I will really get down to the grind again.’ Knowing, of course, perfectly well, of course, that the old bitch hadn’t much longer to go and one might as well, my dear, see the whole bloody business through. ‘Because you see, Kenneth –’ he aspirated and nasalized my name and made it campily preposterous ‘– I am, in spite of my frequently quite unvolitional and usually deeply regretted misdemeanours, the thing you have averred rather too often that I am not. I mean faithful.’ I felt tears again ready to prick at that word. ‘Spiritually, I mean, I think I mean. I mean, what do you call it when it isn’t just physical? That other thing doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ve positively sermonized on that yourself, isn’t that so? And, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you announce this very afternoon that that sort of thing was all over? For you, that is. All all, ah, over.’

We had arrived at a massive siege wall crawling with greenery, so we turned about, seeing the ambushing cats from another angle. The two gardeners, Mr Borg and Mr Grima – these seemed to be very nearly the only two surnames in Lija – were still placidly irrigating. I said:

‘Why don’t we at least look at the more important letters after dinner? I’ve always, as you know, tried to be –’

‘Gentlemanly and punctilious, yes dear. But we’re dining out. And there is to be a birthday cake, though not, I surmise, with eighty-one candles.’

‘But you have to be up to it, dear. It’s the British Council man, Ralph Ovington, and the Poet Laureate, no less, is on a visit.’

‘A nice point, isn’t it? You’re the senior, of course. But he has the OM.’

Yes, Dawson Wignall had the OM. I saw myself in Geoffrey’s twin mirrors – quite cold, not at all bitter. Willie Maugham, poor old bastard, had always maintained that the Order of Merit was really the Order of Morals. Three years previously I had been made, like him, a Companion of Honour and then heard the door of official laureation bang shut on me. The CH is about what the old bitch is worth, I’d say. As for the Nobel, I did not write inelegantly or tendentiously enough. I was not, like Boris Dyengizhdat, in political chains – which, I felt sure, he would break soon enough when the dollar royalties had mounted sufficiently. I did not, like Chaim Manon or J. Raha Jaatinen, belong to a gallant little nation that, possessing no strategical resources, had to be compensated with a great writer. I was, they had always said, cynical, not given to deep feelings or high thoughts. But I still sold well enough. Geoffrey’s office bulged with as yet unanswered fan mail; my birthday had been very adequately remembered. I fulfilled a need, and that was for some reason wrong. I said, sulkily:

‘You held Ralph Ovington’s note in your very own hand, dear. You said nice of him nice of him or some such rubbish. You forget, you know, you forget things.’

‘Listen, dear,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Have we not here the most delicious classical bit of psychowhatsit of everyday life? It’s Ralph, isn’t it, the name Ralph?’ I looked at him. Strangely enough, it was true. Strangely, because I thought I’d got over Freud. I’d even dreamt of Freudian interpretations of the dreams I had just been dreaming. And there I had been kicking Ovington’s name and note and invitation out of my head because of an onomastic coincidence. ‘Black bastard,’ Geoffrey said with no tone of malice. ‘Black bitch. Dear, you really must show yourself as often as possible at your advanced age, you know. Oh, you and I know you’re alive and well and, well, wonderful really, but it’s a good thing to show it to the Poet Laureate, who’s an awful little gossip. If you didn’t turn up he’d take it back home, you know, that the old bugger’s on his way off to the neverneverland, and you’d have the newspapers sharpening their obituaries. Terrible thing, that.’

I sighed deeply. ‘Very well. I’ll rest a little before dressing. In the study. Get Ali to bring me in some strong tea and a few pastries.’

‘Is that wise, dear?’ There was the old harridan in a terminal coma, oozing with goo.

ON THE WALLS of my study I had a Willem de Kooning female in mostly red crayon and one of the first sketches Picasso had done for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, also an Egon Schiele wash drawing of ugly lovers and an abstract composition by Hans Hartung. I had two oxblood leather dub chairs and a matching couch, oldfashioned and chunky. Also books in glass cases, mostly of the wellthumbed favourite variety: the main library was next to the upper salon. Near the original Quiller-Couch edition stood, not wellthumbed, not favourite, the revised Oxford Book of English Verse, bloody Val Wrigley as editor. I took this down and lay on the couch with it, looking for the inevitable selection from Dawson Wignall. I did not much care for what I found – insular, ingrown, formally traditional, products of a stunted mind. Wignall’s themes derived from Anglican church services, the Christmas parties of his childhood, his public school pubescence, suburban shopping streets; they occasionally exhibited perverse velleities of a fetichistic order, though his droolings over girl’s bicycles and gym tunics and black woollen stockings were chilled by whimsical ingenuities of diction. For this sort of thing, then, he had been honoured by the monarch:

Thus kneeling at the altar rail

We ate the Word’s white papery wafer.

Here, so I thought, desire must fail,

My chastity be never safer.

But then I saw your tongue protrude

To catch the wisp of angel’s food.

Dear God! I reeled beneath the shock:

My Eton suit, your party frock,

Christmas, the dark, and postman’s knock!

I returned the book to the shelf and took down Who’s Who, nearly staggering under its weight. I humped it over to what I called my Directory escritory and laid it on the blottingpad. There he was: Wignall, Percival Dawson – not yet OM but tinkling with other awards. His list of literary achievements was exiguous enough, spare output being the mark of a gentleman writer, but the autobiographical epic called Lying in Grass was probably the dehydrated equivalent of ten of my watery novels. I turned to my own entry and gloomed proudly over a whole column of overproduction. Wignall was also Harrow and Trinity College; I was the Thomas More Memorial School and nothing. Ali knocked and I called adelante. While he placed the teatray on the coffeetable I heaved Who’s Who back, shouldered rather. The aroma was of Twining’s Breakfast Tea, which I took at all times except breakfast; at breakfast I drank Blue Mountain. Ali stood waiting as I poured.

He was troubled about something but found difficulty in expressing it. Something metaphysical then, not wages or women or living conditions. At length he said, ‘Allah.’

‘Yes, Ali.’ The cakes were Kunzel, imported in dainty packets of six. It was a comfort to be on a sort of British soil again. ‘Their word for God is evidently the same as yours, but it means the Christian version of the Almighty, not the Moslem one.’

This clearly troubled him. He said excitedly that there was no God but Allah, but Allah was not worshipped in churches, only in mosques, and that Allah was certainly not, so to speak, administered by arzobispos. In Tangier, he said, the whole situation had been perfectly understandable. The Christians had spoken of Dios. He understood that in their churches they had spoken of Deus – the same name almost. Here, however, in their churches – the arzobispo had told him in the bar there, while he drank deep in the manner of Christians – they referred to God as Allah. He did not understand. Not, of course, as I well knew, that he was what one might term a religious man. But the situation here struck him as strange. He had been taught as a boy that there was no God but Allah, and the Tangerine Christians had said there was no God but Dios or Deus. But these Maltese Christians said, just like Moslems, that there was no God but Allah. In churches. It was a strange situation. More, it was what might be termed a bad situation. That I should properly understand this, Ali gave me all available ways of putting it: mala – malvada – maligna – aciaga.

I had now eaten my third Kunzel cake, enough. I said: ‘Once, Ali, in Catholic churches all over the world, they used the Latin name Deus. But now they have what is called the vernacular, since very few ordinary people know Latin. In mosques all over the world they say Allah, but in Catholic churches all over the world they use the vernacular. In Serbo-Croat Bog, in Finnish Jumala, I think, and in Swahili, I know, Mungu. Now here in Malta their language is a kind of Arabic, though it uses the alphabet of the Romans. And in Arabic and Maltese the word for God is the same – Allah. Is that moderately clear?’

It was clear, he said, but it seemed somehow bad. Still, presumably the big men – arzobispos and so on – knew what they were doing, but nevertheless it did not seem right for Catholics in their churches to be calling on Allah. Then he changed the subject by taking from his white jacket pocket a small parcel and shyly handing it to me. It was a little regalo, he said, today being my cumpleaños. I checked the emotional lability by wondering why he had not made the presentation earlier. Perhaps because he knew that Geoffrey would say something sneering about it and this was the first time today he had found me alone. ‘Thank you, Ali, very very much,’ unwrapping it. It was pretty horrible, of course, by the standards of the sneerers of the world: a cigarette lighter of cheap metal encrusted with a Maltese cross. ‘Beautiful,’ I said. Ali waited. I struck it and it worked. Ali waited. I got myself a cigarette and lighted it. ‘Wonderful,’ I said, having drawn deeply. ‘It imparts a special taste to the tobacco.’ This was the kind of manifestly insincere response that Ali’s culture required. Satisfied, he nodded and went out, saying something with Allah in it, perhaps appropriate to a birthday. So. It looked as if it were not going to be easy to get away from His late Holiness Pope Gregory XVII today, meaning fat little Don Carlo Campanati. His reforms were upsetting even Ali.

I lay on the couch shortening my life and clutching Ali’s gift like some token of faith – not inappositely, considering the Maltese cross. I thought of my brother Tom, who had smoked three cigarettes in his entire career and yet had died of lung cancer at forty-four. Tommy Toomey. With a name like that he had been destined to set up as a professional comedian, and he had done well enough, especially on the British radio in the 1930s. But the cough had become increasingly a hindrance to his sharp, bright, somewhat highpitched delivery. Comedians of the old demotic school, like George Formby Sr, had been able to make comic capital out of audibly dying (‘Coughing better today, lads’ and so on), but Tom’s way had been one of rapid wit. His speciality had been the surrealist reshaping of English literature, and this had presupposed an audience of some education. Such an audience was ceasing to exist when Tom’s onstage or instudio coughing began to be uncontrollable. He had had the best of his time when he came to die, and he knew it. He died in the faith in a hospital near Hendon, having tried to joke some few hours before about a special niche in purgatory for British Catholic comedians. He died clutching something – rosary beads, probably. I put Ali’s gift in my trouser pocket. I supposed that Tom might find it easier to get out of purgatory – if the now much impaired eschatology of fat Carlo’s Church still admitted its existence – if he had a saint more or less in the family, or should I say more precisely had a saint as brother to his sister’s husband. Then, having doused my lifeshortener, I savoured an old man’s doze.

About the Author

About the Book

ALSO AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CLASSICS

THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE

Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess

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