The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [106]
He looked at Mason, with his distrustful eyes and sullen cheekbones; Mason, lithe and powerful, with the look on him of an angel about to fall. There was strength in Mason, right enough. But it seemed to be entirely of the bludgeoning sort. He’d asked Mason how he’d planned to keep his sister sedated and therefore safer while they were away. Morphine, Mason told him, sourced from a tame doctor in Herne Bay. How do you tame a doctor, Seaton had wondered out loud.
‘You make him grateful. He had a problem with a gang of seafront B&B scumbags, living on benefits and demanding methadone scripts with menaces. It got worse after he went to the police. He contacted me in desperation after they beat up his twelve-year-old kid.’
Seaton had laughed. ‘How many kneecappings did you actually have to perform?’
‘Only the one,’ Mason told him.
Seaton hadn’t been able to tell whether he was joking or not.
Now, he felt a chill as cold as mountain water seep into his soul. He thought about the long corkscrew of descending turns on the snowbound road beyond the monastery walls, separating him from the skiers sharing Glühwein in their pretty cabins a thousand metres down the slopes from where he sat. Here, he was in the domain of the crag and the blizzard, high, where avalanches gathered their profound and fatal enormity. He felt lonely. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. In truth, he had spent every waking hour of his last twelve years in lonely conditions of varying intensity. But even by his own dismal standards, here and now, he felt very isolated. And it wasn’t just loneliness, was it? What Seaton really felt, what really isolated him, was fear. That was where his Rider Haggard fantasy really fell apart. He wasn’t valorous and staunch. He knew it, in the company now of these two brave men. He was a coward, mortified, alone.
In the room, the silence was broken. ‘We’ve met before, Father,’ Mason said.
Lascalles smiled at him. ‘Twice,’ he said.
Mason looked nonplussed. ‘Twice?’
‘On the first occasion, you were very young. I am not offended you do not remember. But I remember, for the joy and the relief the moment brought me. I baptised you, Nicholas.’ He smiled again, more broadly. He gestured for his guests to sit. They sank back on to their chairs at the table and he sat himself, in an armchair facing them. ‘I see I have your attention. But we need to begin at the beginning, do we not. And I suppose the beginning for me was when I met Wheatley, at the front, at the place history has come to remember as Passchendaele, in the autumn of 1917.’
His faith had been severely tested even before the outbreak of war. He had been a novice priest when a great passenger vessel foundered five hundred miles from Newfoundland at night in the freezing Atlantic. He had read the newspaper account with greedy incredulity; unable to believe a merciful God could allow so many so young and innocent to perish in such hopeless circumstances.
‘April of 1912,’ Lascalles told Seaton and Mason. ‘I was a boy of seventeen when the Titanic went down. My vocation was almost sunk with the doomed ship.’
But he was young. And the young have enthusiasm. And his enthusiasm renewed his belief in something more exalted than a world of profit and sensation and the imperial hunger of nations. So the outbreak of war in Europe hardly intruded on his own intense speculations on the true meanings of the Gospels. Or of his intense joy at discovering the poetry of his fellow Jesuit, the Welshman Manley Hopkins. In the spring of 1916, he was ordained a priest in Rome by the pontiff himself.
But it transpired there was little time to rejoice in Eternal Truth or debate theology with other learned servants of God. And there was even less time for poetry. By the summer, Lascalles had been seconded as chaplain to an infantry battalion of the French army. By the autumn, he was reading funeral rites over mass-burial pits filled with quicklime as they interred French dead by the hundreds, by the day, during the battle for