Henry and Cato (7 page)

By the end of this period however, by the time of the closing of the Mission, the question of what Cato would or would not have otherwise done about this spiritual crisis was already becoming academic, since something else, also quite unexpected and extraordinary, had happened to him. Cato had met Beautiful Joe quite early on in his Paddington days, when even Reggie Poole had still been around. Beautiful Joe was one of a number of teenagers, all from Catholic families, all cheerfully ‘lapsed', who had adopted the Mission at the start, making a nuisance of themselves, ragging the priests, playing practical jokes, stealing things and sometimes professing to have religious problems. The other boys had gradually got tired of the Mission after the first novelty had faded. Some of them in any case were ‘Reggie's boys' or ‘Gerald's boys'. In the end they went away, and ‘Cato's boys' went away too: except for Beautiful Joe.

Cato had never for a second thought of himself as a homosexual. He had felt no strong emotions about other boys at school. At college he had been in love with girls, though without managing to do a great deal about it. The vow of chastity when it came had not dismayed him. Of course he felt attracted by the young maidens who came to him so confidently for advice and to confess their trifling sins, but of course he had no difficulty at all in keeping his hands off them. He had often reflected on how merciful it was that at least
that
was not one of his problems.

Beautiful Joe caught Cato's attention early on as a picturesque and interesting phenomenon. Joe had left school at sixteen, after doing rather well and being pressed by his teachers to continue his education. He was obviously intelligent. He came of a not very poor Catholic family in Holland Park. His father, who had died when Joe was ten, had been a hairdresser. His mother worked as a clerk at a primary school. There were books in the house. Cato had called there once, but Joe's mother had shown so much embarrassment, almost hostility, that he had not repeated his visit. Joe was the youngest of six boys. The others had all by now left home, left London, or simply vanished. Joe had in fact, as Cato later learnt, left home too. Cato did not know where Joe lived. Joe was mysterious. How Joe acquired money, which he undoubtedly did, was also a mystery since he appeared to have no employment. ‘He's a baby crook,' Reggie had said at first sight of Joe. It took Cato some time and some reluctance to come to agree.

Cato had felt rather gratified at being Joe's favourite, since Joe was certainly the cleverest as well as the handsomest of the little gang of boys who frequented the Mission. What was more important, Joe was the only one who really seemed to want and to attend to spiritual advice. ‘He's having you on,' Gerald said. ‘He is and he isn't,' said Cato, feeling wiser. What was extraordinary from the start was how easy he found it to talk to Joe. Cato could talk to people of course, but he could not, the way for instance Gerald could, simply
chatter
to them about serious matters. He and Beautiful Joe chattered about the resurrection, about the Trinity, about the immaculate conception, about transubstantiation, about papal infallibility, about Hitler, about Buddhism, about communism, about existentialism—in fact it later occurred to Cato that they had talked about pretty well everything except sex. Joe did not seem to be particularly interested in sex as a topic of discussion. ‘Sex is a bore,' he once said, ‘I mean having sex is a bore.' Joe had had plenty of girls, as he casually explained. ‘Would you like to get married?' Cato once asked him. ‘
Married?
Girls are muck, they aren't real people, they're a slave race.'

Cato, who felt the utmost curiosity about Joe, soon began delicately to question him about other aspects of his life. Joe was remarkably, almost disarmingly frank. ‘Get a job, me? Talk about a bank job, I might be interested.' ‘But how do you live?' ‘I nick things. O.K. You don't believe in property, neither do I.' ‘Surely you could do something better than that.' ‘You bet I could, I'm going into protection, going to employ little kids, scare the shopkeepers silly.' ‘You ought to go to college and learn things.' ‘I learnt something yesterday.' ‘What?' ‘How to slash a pig with a razor and be sure of leaving a scar.' ‘Violence won't get you anything that you really want.' ‘Won't it? Show a man a knife and he'll do anything. Isn't that pleasure?' Another time he said, ‘I want to get in with the Mafia. I know someone who knows a big man.' Such talk was clearly designed to shock and to provoke arguments and reproofs, and Cato did not take it too seriously, though he believed that Joe probably did, in a small way, ‘nick things'. On other days Joe was a revolutionary, talking about joining the IRA, destroying capitalism, bombing the prots, bombing the Jews. ‘I'm an anarchist, see. The straight world is just a racket, business, capitalism, TV, money, sex, all a racket. Look what happened to the Beatles. They just got bloody rich!'

When Cato realized how much he was enjoying these conversations and observed that, however busy he was, he always somehow had time for Joe, he became nervous. All his old fears about collusion came back to him. He made feeble efforts to get rid of Joe, to pass him on to Father Thomas. ‘Talk to that square? You're the only one who understands me, Father, you're the only one who can get through to me.' Cato was touched. He had no evidence, unless the continued conversations were themselves evidence, that he was having any sort of influence on the boy. But surely it was better to go on talking to him and holding onto him, rather than to abandon him to the world about which he talked so glibly and whose reality round about him Cato had already come to discern. Of course Joe was not ‘vicious', he could be saved. He was just a young person with different principles, a young person in revolt against a society with which Cato was in his own way at odds. ‘You're the only one who has ever cared for me, Father, you're the only one who can really
see
me at all.' This was irresistible. If this is even half true, Cato thought, I must stick to this boy through thick and thin. But of course he had already decided that it was his duty to go on talking to Joe. They argued about property, about capitalism, about freedom, often having the same argument over and over again. Cato tried eloquence, persuasion, logic, everything except anger. He knew that anger, which was what Joe wanted, would be the worst collusion of all. Surely that grain of truth could be deposited somewhere. Beautiful Joe was respectful, flatteringly devoted, yet also stubborn, curiously aloof and full of pretences of iniquity. Would he come to confession, would he come to mass? Maybe, one day. When? Maybe, maybe. Is he just amusing himself, Cato wondered.

Beautiful Joe was now always in Cato's prayers. The image of the youth caused him exasperation, excitement, pity. Of course he loved Joe, after all nothing less than loving him would help him at all. How terribly he loved Joe only dawned upon him gradually. Visiting Brendan he said, ‘I think I've fallen in love with one of those boys, the one you met.' ‘The angel with the hexagonal glasses? Don't worry, we all fall for lovely boys.' Cato could not get Brendan to take his new predicament seriously. Besides, by now there was the other far more awful question: was there a God? On one hideous sleepless night, smoking cigarette after cigarette (he had started smoking again), Cato suddenly began to realize that the two things must be connected, they
must
be connected. Perhaps Beautiful Joe had been sent especially to tempt him. When had he begun to doubt God? At the time when Beautiful Joe came into his life. Was not the boy playing with him, coolly probing him, reaching into his soul and confusing all his thoughts? That curious amused cynical aloofness: how could a boy of seventeen be so detached and cool?

Of course these thoughts were mad, as he recognized when he next talked to Joe, seeing now no demon, but the confused silly vulnerable boy, the boy who depended on him and needed him, the boy whom only he could reach. ‘I'm off shoplifting.' ‘Good.' ‘I'm going to Belfast to kill those Protestant shits.' ‘No you aren't.' ‘Aren't I, Father?' ‘I wish I could see into your heart.' ‘You can.' But Cato could not. His own heart was swelling and aching. When they looked at each other Cato was the first to look away. Yet Joe was perfectly tactful, perfectly docile, there was no exhibition of emotion, they remained priest and pupil and a weird decorum reigned between them.

About the time when the Mission was officially closing Cato made a discovery in the house. He noticed in one of the bedrooms a cupboard in the wall which had been papered over so as to be almost invisible except when the bright sunlight shone into the room at a certain time. There was no handle on the cupboard door, there was only a tell-tale slit. Probing with his fingers, then with a knife, Cato, in search of some blankets, which might or might not have been stolen, prized open the cupboard door. There were no blankets, but stowed far back on one of the shelves there was a revolver in a leather case. Cato took it out and studied it. The case was clean and the gun had been newly polished. He had little doubt that it belonged to Joe. Joe had the key of the house, which Cato had given him as a gesture of confidence. The cupboard afforded a safe hiding place, safer presumably than wherever it was that Joe lived. Cato could not decide what he should do. He hid the revolver in his bed, and when he next saw Joe he said nothing about it. He wondered if he were wronging the boy after all. Then the presence of the weapon in the house began to upset him intensely. He kept pulling back the blankets and looking at it and touching it. At last he had taken it and dropped it into the Thames from Hungerford Bridge. That was last night.

And now his cigarette was burning his fingers and he was staring at Beautiful Joe, while in his mind a gabble was going on which was like the gabble of an idiot: the automatic machinery of prayer, which fruitlessly continued without his will and without his heart. The beseeching never stopped, the crying out for mercy, the crying out for light, once such a ready source of power, was more like an obscene involuntary symptom of disease. No one receiving, Cato's mind raced. It occurred to him for a moment, since there is no God why should I not say all these things,
all
these things to Joe? This idea fled by. He put out the cigarette, thinking clearly for the first time, I cannot help this boy. Our relationship is a dangerous muddle and a nonsense. I must leave him absolutely and for good. I can do nothing for him, nothing. I must say good-bye to him tonight. This is the logical, the easiest, moment to do it. It is, oh God, now. No need to make a drama. I must save myself. I must go away somewhere and think. I must get back to some innocent place where I can
see.

‘Where shall I come to you, Father?' said Beautiful Joe, looking straight at Cato, his eyes, enlarged by his glasses, seeming like the golden staring eyes of a ginger cat.

How thin he is, thought Cato, how frail really, how defenceless. ‘Joe, I wish I could pull you out of that world.'

‘What world?'

‘You know.'

‘Well, then take my hand and pull.' Joe stretched out his hand.

Cato ignored the outstretched hand. ‘You've got wits, you've got sense, why don't you see?'

‘Take me with you.'

‘Where?'

‘Where you're going.'

‘I can't.'

‘I'll make money, then I'll retire like, I'll learn things and read books, I'll read all the classics.'

‘I wish you would!'

‘But I got to make money first and prove myself, prove I can win at my own game. You don't want me just to join the rat race, do you?'

‘Joe, if you get into that bad way of life you won't be able to get out again, if you take to violence you'll be caught by it, you'll just become the tool of very wicked men.'

‘Who said anything about violence, Father? You shouldn't take me so serious, the things I say. Anyway, you can't get away from violence, can you? Pigs use violence, don't they? The IRA had to use violence, otherwise they wouldn't get justice, you can't get justice under capitalism without violence, look at the trade unions. When you get down to the nitty gritty, everything rests on violence in the end.'

‘No, it doesn't, Joe, listen—'

‘Capitalism's finished anyway. Why should a few people have everything and everybody else have nothing? Just look at Ladbroke Grove, there's the capitalist world for you. Fucking millionaires one end and us at the other. No wonder they need the army and the police! This society's rotten to the core, and you know it as well as I do, that's why you've dropped out of it, that's why you live here, that's why you dress like that, I can understand. You know property's unjust, it's wicked, that's why you've got nothing. You went to Oxford College but you're as poor as we are. You had an electric kettle but somebody stole it.'

‘You probably did.'

‘People are just slaves, otherwise they wouldn't put up with it, they wouldn't put up with starving misery when there's millionaires on yachts, why should they? But they're slaves. Just like the Jews. I was reading a paper about those concentration camps. Why did the Jews go, why were they like bloody sheep, why didn't they fight? And in the camps, there were lots of them, why did they let themselves be gassed, why didn't they kill the guards? I'd have made a fight of it if I'd been them.'

‘They weren't organized,' said Cato. ‘And they weren't soldiers. Violence has to be learnt. They were just a lot of ordinary peaceful citizens pulled out of offices and shops. They were a lot of frightened individuals, and each individual wanted to survive and probably thought he would survive if he kept quiet. He didn't want to be the one to risk being shot or tortured.'

‘Lot of bloody cowards. I'd have
hated
those Nazi swine so much, I'd have killed them with my hands. All the same, old Hitler knew a thing or two, you can't help admiring him.'