The Gospel Of Judas by Simon Mawer Read Free Book Online Page A

shoulder – became something that each was aware of.
    ‘It’s a bit like having our own personal chaplain,’ Jack remarked of his presence one day when they were out walking in the Alban Hills.
    ‘Good gracious, I hope not,’ Leo protested, and Madeleine echoed his words exactly – ‘Good gracious, I hope not’ – so that the twin supplications stumbled across one another and it was unclear who had spoken first. There was something embarrassing about the coincidence, as though they had been caught embracing and needed to provide some kind of excuse.
    ‘You always laugh at the same things,’ her older daughter said; and her words, with their tone of accusation, brought a strange silence to the group, as though something had been said that should have been covered up, kept secret, been consigned to the limbo wherein are laid matters of family disgrace.
    The thread of contingency is inscrutable. Somewhere above the Dead Sea a ragtag group of students and archaeologists was at work picking over the bones of the past, kneeling in the dust and sifting fragments from the rubbish, and finding there the first hints of disaster. While somewhere in Rome a married woman and a dry and sterile priest shared something fragmentary and ill-defined: a sympathy, a sense of irony, a feeling of doubt, a sensation of discovery.
    ‘May I ask you a dangerous question, Leo?’ Madeleine was smiling her small, Irish smile and watching him in that way she had, with her head tilted slightly on one side. Questions in the confessional are dangerous, but this was not the confessional – this was somewhere mundane: the kitchen of the Brewers’ flat, amidst a litter of bottles and unwashed glasses. Beyond the kitchen door was the noise of a party. Jack was holding forth about dealings with an Italian ministry, about the absurdities of the bureaucracy, the arcane hierarchies, the subtle obligations and inducements. ‘It’s not so much
who
you know,’ Leo heard him saying, ‘it’s who they
think
you know.’
    ‘May I?’
    ‘Go on.’
    She paused, as though perhaps building up her courage. ‘Did you join the priesthood because you don’t like women?’
    He felt a faint reddening, perhaps a glimmer of anger. ‘No, of course that’s not the reason.’
    A maid came in with a tray and there was a brief exchange in pidgin Italian. When she had gone he found Madeleine looking at him curiously, as if she was standing before an abstract painting and trying to make sense of it. She seemed to have steeled herself to pursue the matter. ‘But is it so? That you don’t, I mean.’
    ‘I’m not homosexual, if that’s what you’re asking.’
    She looked away, busied herself with a plate of canapés. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry if I’ve made you cross.’
    ‘You haven’t made me cross.’
    ‘Yes I have. I can tell better than you can yourself. I know that expression. But I just wanted to know. You probably don’t understand, but I wanted to know.’
    He watched her go out into the noise of the party, watched the quick and artful way she switched mood as the laughter and chatter greeted her in the other room. He watched her join the party and he thought of Elise. A lifetime trying to banish her image to the depths of his psyche, but still it rose to the surface. Elise, who had come nearest to breaking through whatever barriers he had set up in adolescence; Elise, who had almost upset the strange physics of sublimation that is the key to celibacy. Even after all those years he could picture her still, as though she was sitting out there on the sofa amongst the crowded adults of Madeleine’s party, her knees demurely together, her patent leather shoes carefully parked side by side. He had been nineteen, Elise a mere fifteen. She possessed a pretty and totally mendacious downward cast of the eyes, rosy cheeks that might have been applied with rouge, rather heavy eyebrows, and a faint, dark down at the corners of her