A Pious Killing Read online
Page 9
Hitler nodded wisely.
Sean was in disbelief. Had he just heard correctly? The representative of the Pope himself had just agreed that political parties with a religious stamp had no place in politics. What did that mean for the millions of Catholics in Germany who voted for their representatives in the Catholic Centre Party? What did that mean for traditional groupings that might be able to provide opposition to the likes of Hitler and his Nazis? What about the political parties at home in Ireland and their ties to the Church? But while he was thinking this Pacelli was continuing.
“The Holy Father wishes to remind the world that the message of Christ is one of love, charity and forgiveness. Hatred has no place in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
‘This is better stuff,’ Sean was thinking. Now we will see how Hitler explains his message of hatred towards the Jews and all the other minorities and ethnicities he pours his vitriol on. ‘Hitler’s response began,’ Sean thought, ‘with the duplicity of a skilled politician.’
“We are filled with a love for the German people and race. The Aryan inspires us with love and we generously extend that love to others. Our aim is to improve the lives of all of our people. But to truly love our brethren we must protect them from the poison that floods the waters of their minds. The Bolshevik, the Jew with their lewd, lascivious, bestial natures would destroy our people. To shrink from the fight with these forces would be to run from the responsibilities of love and to hide like cowards in the forests of the night.”
Here was the moment when Sean Colquhoun’s life might have taken a different turning from the road he was to eventually travel. He knew what he expected Cardinal Pacelli to say. He was almost prepared to mouth the words with him as he spoke, so certain was he of the reply to come. But when Pacelli spoke they were the wrong words and Sean felt the walls of his life fall away into a bottomless pit.
“The Bolshevik is the true enemy of Christian civilisation. He is the anti-Christ. I have seen with my own eyes the results of Bolshevism during my time as Papal Nuncio in Munich during the Red Terror there. You will have no greater ally than the Holy Father in Rome in your fight against Bolshevism. Now the Jew. The poor misguided Jew. The Jew is a victim of his own hard-heartedness. He closes his heart to the great good news of the Saviour’s birth; the Saviour prophesised in their own scriptures. With this hard-heartedness he brings his problems upon himself. He carries on his hands the blood of deicide. There is nothing more to say about the Jew.”
Sean sat back in his armchair in amazed disbelief. He doubted the evidence of his own ears. He looked around the room at the faces of the other witnesses to this shocking interchange. All he saw were pious faces nodding sagely in agreement with the sentiments expressed.
Suddenly Hitler was on his feet and launching into a speech. Sean could see the confidence surging through him. He praised the Cardinal for his modern views and drew parallels between the authoritarian structure of the Church and the State he intended to create when he was Chancellor, which he asserted was inevitable. He whipped his boots with his riding crop several times and then stepped forward to grasp the Cardinal’s ring hand. He stooped stiffly, kissed the holy icon and then strode theatrically from the room. Gregor Strasser jumped to his feet and ran out after him.
Everyone, including the Cardinal, sat in silence for a long time. Eventually, Hugo stood up and threw open the French doors that led into the garden. There was the tangible bursting of a dread atmosphere and people got to their feet and wandered outside.
Everyone there took their turn to approach the Cardinal in the garden and offer their congratulations for the way in which he had put the upstart in his place. Everyone except Sean. Sean could not see how they drew that conclusion. Or was it just a form of German politeness? To his mind, Hitler had totally dominated the exchanges and was fully justified in walking out of that house confident that the Roman Catholic Church had no issue with his plans for governing Germany.
He found himself beside Magda as they strolled alongside the floral borders.
“Are you all right, Sean?” she asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well you are pale. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
‘How appropriate,’ Sean thought with intense irony. ‘I have just seen a ghost; the ghost of all my beliefs and certainties evaporating into oblivion.’
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Well,” Magda concluded as she moved away to join Hugo with Pacelli. “We can take comfort in the thought that that little horrible man will never gain power in Germany.”
Raul and Grete sat in stony silence as Sean finished his tale. Eventually Grete spoke. “Magda is right, isn’t she? He will never come to power. Germany is far too mature for that!”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Sean. “But it’s not Hitler that worries me, it’s the Catholic Church. I am shocked to my core with the things I have heard today. They go against everything I was taught to believe in. I was taught Christianity at the hands of Catholic priests. I know they didn’t always practise what they preached – especially when they were beating the living daylights out of us. But I always gave them the benefit of the doubt. I always believed they were acting in our best interests. Now I have none of that belief left. I know the Church has always dallied with a certain amount of moderate anti-Semitism. But what I’ve heard today frightens and appals me.”
Raul and Grete sat in silence for a long time.
“Maybe I’m not the over-sensitive one,” commented Raul at length. “Perhaps I’ve been reading the runes correctly all along!”
Eleven
1938
In the days and weeks following their disagreement on the walk home from Hagan’s, Martha and Sean failed to heal the small breach that had appeared between them. In the morning Sean cursed himself when he remembered his part revelation. He could not understand how he had allowed himself to do it. Pure irritation at Hagan’s smugness – that’s what had done it. But even so, how could he have allowed such a trivial thing as that to get under his skin so much so that he would blab in a way that might ultimately endanger his beloved Martha.
For her part, Martha decided to wait for Sean to volunteer the full truth of his views. She wanted him to explain why he had allowed others to believe that those views and opinions which he expressed, or allowed to go unchallenged, were not in fact his own. And she wanted him to do it of his own accord. She did not want to badger him into telling her. Sean’s mistake was to believe that Martha had woken up the next day and dismissed their discussion as a silly tiff. This was a mere hope, but he clung to it until it seemed to convince him.
Eventually they returned to themselves, but this gap lay between them. Martha prayed and asked for guidance. She rationalised that she loved Sean and he was her husband until death. Therefore she would accept this…. well, what was it? She found it hard to call it a betrayal. But it sure felt like one. Whatever it was, she would accept it. She would accept that it had inserted a splinter into their relationship which had spoiled something so precious that she had considered it to be as near perfect as made no difference. She mourned the loss of that perfection but told herself to grow up and asked herself - who ever told you to expect perfection on earth?
Although never devout, she found that the church and personal prayer had given her the means to achieve a kind of peace of mind and so she was drawn closer to it. Meanwhile Sean was mightily relieved to believe that the squall was over and hoped it would stay that way until the day came when he would have to tell Martha his whole story.
It was at about this time that Sean took to visiting London. This was something Martha had been vaguely aware of in Sean’s life before they had married. But since the wedding he had ceased the visits, until now. It was not just one visit but many, and some of them lasted for many days. The longest was for three weeks. Sean was now fully qualified and had a temporary post at Dublin University hospital alongside James Callan. James had reassured Sean that the
post would become permanent but Sean told Martha he could not be sure of that. His visits to London, he explained, were to seek a permanent post. Other times he said it was for crisis management and for training in the treatment of victims of explosions.
Martha had no idea why she did not believe Sean, she just knew that she didn’t. However, her lack of trust in Sean was becoming a burden. So much so that whenever he was away she would go to the church of St Peter and say her confession to Father O’Shea, the young curate who was attached there as he awaited his transfer to the Parish of the Sacred Heart in Cork. At first she just sought forgiveness for her lack of trust in her husband, which she saw as a venial though potentially dangerous sin.
Father O’Shea forgave here her sins and counselled her to put her doubts behind her. If she could not do that then in the interests of a lasting marriage she should voice her concerns to her husband.
But then the visits to London seemed to have stopped and soon Martha and Sean were preparing to leave the capital city and their student days behind them for good as Sean moved into general practice in Cork with Dr. Townley.
Martha was thrilled. She hoped for a new beginning. She convinced herself that getting away from Dublin would free them from the friction that had arisen between them there. She could not completely reconcile herself to the loss of her academic life but she had found ways of compensating for that. ‘Deferred gratification’ is how the middle classes labelled it. She also drew pleasure from the knowledge that Father O’Shea would soon be transferring to the Sacred Heart church in Cork and that she would be able to retain him as her confessor.
Twelve
This truly felt like the beginning of their lives together. They bought a cottage with an acre of land on the Cork side of Cobh, just a fifteen minute drive to the downtown surgery of Townley and Colquhoun. Like every general practitioner in the late 1930s, Sean found that a motor car was an essential symbol of solidity and success. With enthusiasm, they threw themselves into a complete renovation of their first property with its spectacular views out over the southern coastline across the broad Atlantic Ocean.
With the cottage refurbished and redecorated, 1938 turned into 1939 and Martha found herself pregnant again. There was much joy at the news in the Colquhoun and Grady families. There was a Christmas visit to Galway, where the Grady’s now lived, and a New Year stay over at the Colquhoun’s farm in County Cork. Sean and Martha were both feeling closer again and that brought back much of their original happiness.
As January crept its painful way into the new year, Sean returned to work at the practice and Martha spent her time with her first born son, Cornelius, whom they called Conny. She also made herself active in the little community around that side of Cobh, particularly in the local church. She took to attending Mass on most weekdays and then sitting in the church hall with other mothers and spinsters of the parish, discussing the state of the world and helping to organise fund-raising activities for the missionaries in Africa and the Far East. She became closer to Father O’Shea, the popular young curate who often joined the ladies for their morning sessions and also rolled up his sleeves to help when they polished the altar rails and changed the flowers in the vases.
Although she was reluctant to admit it to herself, Martha, a well-educated young woman, was not fulfilled by the activities a married woman in Ireland of the 1930s was expected to confine herself to. She maintained her academic reading, sketched out plans for articles and even a book, which she would return to once the children were older. Her subject being German theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries she did not find it easy to discuss her ideas with Sean. His ambivalence towards modern Germany made her self-conscious whenever the subject was raised. She became all too quickly aware that there were boundaries they must not cross if the equilibrium their relationship had achieved was not to be disturbed. On the other hand she found Father O’Shea more than willing to listen to her ideas and views and he provided her with an outlet for her intellectual needs.
Sean had just finished dealing with a young man of twenty-two who was in the early stages of tuberculosis. His coughing had rattled the shelves in the surgery. The blood on his handkerchief was of a startlingly bright shade. As Sean bade him farewell with a bottle of useless medicine in his pocket, he knew the man’s days were numbered because he would never be able to afford the treatment he so desperately needed. A porter on Cork’s riverside railway depot, his wages were insufficient to feed his young family properly.
He was at the sink in the corner washing his hands, his back to the door, when he heard the next patient enter his surgery.
“Good morning,” he said without turning as he dried his hands on a white towel.
The absence of any reply caused him to turn out of curiosity before he had finished the act of drying his hands. The figure he saw before him made him stop his hand drying instantly. His face lit up in bemused recognition.
“Well in the name of all that’s holy! What are you doing here?”
The man opposite Sean still did not speak. He was a small man, maybe five foot six but with a wiry physique that made him look taller. He had a shock of dark brown hair and a wild red beard. He wore a workman’s clothes of corduroy trousers, a dark blue shirt and an old suit jacket stained with earth and oil. His face beamed with pleasure and he spread his arms out, inviting Sean into a manly embrace.
The men grasped each other powerfully and then stepped back and scragged each other’s shoulders.
“Well say something, for Jesus’ sake,” complained Sean.
“Ah will you look at you. By God I’d say you’ve put on a few pounds since we were last together,” the man at last said.
Sean looked the other up and down. “I can’t say as much for you. You’re as much a whippet now as you were in the old days.”
“Well you know now I stayed in the field. None of your idle university ways for me.”
“Eamonn Brodie, you were always the laziest sleepy-Joe I ever knew. You just burn up energy without moving. I swear you burn it in your sleep. You’ll never have an ounce of fat on you.”
Thirteen
1921
The window pane clattered fit to break as a cluster of grit collided with it. Seventeen year old Sean, already out of bed and dressed, crossed his ice-cold bedroom and lifted the flimsy curtain to peer out into the impenetrable dark of the County Cork midnight. He saw a match flare and he knew that Eamonn was outside in the yard. Tiptoeing to his door he pulled it open a crack and listened. There was the sound of his father snoring, and that meant his Ma was asleep too, for if she had not been he would have heard her ordering her noisy spouse to rollover off his back and give over that terrible row.
Noiselessly, he closed his bedroom door and went back to the window. Pulling aside the curtain, he slid the sash upwards and climbed astride the sill. Standing on the outhouse roof he slid his window closed again and then jumped down into the yard.
“Over here ya big eejit,” he heard Eamonn call in his famous clandestine whisper.
As Sean reached Eamonn’s side he said, “Will you shut your gob before you wake up every Black and Tan between here and Galway Bay!”
“Enough o’ that,” said Eamonn, suddenly business-like. “Come on, lead the way. You know where the artillery is.”
Sean picked his way faultlessly across the yard, despite the thick black of the night. He led Eamonn to the barn and once inside they were able to light an oil lamp. Beneath a bed of hay Sean lifted a set of boards and brought out two rifles and a package wrapped loosely in sacking. He handed one of the rifles to Eamonn and then reached into the gap once more and pulled out a leather satchel.
“Here,” he whispered. He gave Eamonn several rounds of ammunition and Eamon immediately loaded his rifle. Sean did the same and then, with rifles broken, they stashed the sacking parcel into the satchel. Sean threw the strap of the satchel around his shoulder and they hurried away from the barn yard into the night.
A Pious Killing