Free Three Cheers For The Paraclete by Thomas Keneally Page B

remembered by the students when the story of Maitland’s treachery became known to them. He took the first step and then almost fell. Maitland’s hand, concealed beneath table level, had him by the skirts of his soutane.
    ‘Listen to me,’ Maitland told him so loudly that Nolan gave up his bogus enthrallment in the reading and glowered down the table, crooked horns of light from the windows taking the forefront of his head, making of him a prim and institutional Moses. ‘I didn’t know that slimy boy was a journalist. I’m not that much of an utter fool either.’
    ‘Are you going to let go of me?’ Costello roared.
    Nolan, his cheeks blue with reproach, had no choice then but to ring the bell before him and put an end to the reading so that Costello’s high temper could be drowned out by conversation.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Maitland said, and handed back the newspaper. ‘But I didn’t know.’
    Costello marched out, more or less as planned. He had become very large and even more barrel-chested with anger.
    At the top table, Maitland had stood up and was edging behind Nolan’s chair to speak with Egan. The little priest received the explanations at worst judicially and at best sunnily. He said, ‘But you have to be particularly careful with strangers, James. You have no idea of the number of people on and off the panel who consider it fair sport to prey on Dr Costello and me. It worries Dr Costello.’
    Yet it didn’t seem to find Dr Egan home at all. Propriety alone seemed to motivate him towards the grave or genial acceptances he kept giving to Maitland’s story. He was impatient for Maitland to finish, and closed the topic with one sentence: ‘Just let me warn you, James. Suspect any stranger who so much as mentions the Couraigne prize to you.’ This said not nearly so urgently as the words themselves demanded.
    Then Egan lowered his voice, his eyes wavered in such a way that he could have been a travelling salesman telling about the farmer’s daughter.
    ‘Did you notice? More letters about the Quinlan book. And a review in the book section. Pity you can’t join the fray.’
    ‘I wish I could,’ Maitland lied, beginning to see that his friend was an anomalous sort of man. Egan was concerned with blasphemous art and radical opinion in the way that an idle woman is interested in her neighbour’s sins, but honesty and lassitude both kept him from taking the shrew’s overly moral tone. It was possible to believe, comparing Costello’s wrath and Egan’s unsurprise, that Egan was the one who might well be frying bigger fish of unknown and unexpected species.
    Maitland kept to the point of his betrayal. ‘I don’t want to offer this as an excuse for being a Judas, but I was in an anti-clerical mood, having just finished an argument with the monsignor.’
    Egan’s boyish hand raided a silver dish of marmalade. There was no doubt he was feeling well today.
    ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘You think of yourself as less of a priest than he is, and so you think that a word against the priesthood is a word against him.’ He went out of his way, by grinning, to imply that this reflection was curious, not moral. ‘Don’t let the monsignor give you a sacerdotal inferiority complex.’ He made agesture of amplitude with his bread-and-butter knife. ‘It’s everyone’s eternal priesthood,’ he said. ‘You surely can’t have anything more eternal than eternal.’
    ‘Even the way that man does his hair reminds me of the everlasting hills. Never mind.’
    ‘You mentioned an argument, James.’
    ‘Yes. Over my sermon. I’m rostered to preach at the cathedral tomorrow. The president wanted to censor my sermon.’
    ‘The cheek!’ Egan beat the table with his furled serviette. ‘I’ve never heard of such hide. As if anyone can hear what you say in there anyhow. It’s for all the world like one of those old-fashioned railway terminals. It isn’t exactly Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, is it?’
    ‘I hope