The Gospel Of Judas Read Online Free PDF Page B

sports paper.
    ‘Do you think the worst of me?’ she asked. They stood for a moment in the entrance. The urgency of her departure seemed to have vanished.
    ‘I think the best of you.’
    ‘That is
very
dangerous.’ She touched his arm. She might have raised herself on her toes and kissed him on the cheek, but it didn’t seem appropriate just there, beneath the plaque that talked of popes and pontiffs, of stern fathers and bridge-builders between God and man. So she just squeezed his arm, a quick sharp grasp, and told him that she would be in touch soon and turned and walked away down the narrow street, her shoes clipping on thestones, her feet wobbling on the awkward unevenness of the setts. And he felt an absurd and pungent sense of loss.

3
    Leo amongst the women and the coffee cups, with Saint Clare looking down on him with anguish as though appalled to see one of her kind embroiled in the trivial and the quotidian. Leo answering polite questions politely – they had been to see the Roman cemetery beneath the crypt of Saint Peter’s – and wanting Madeleine to come and speak to him. He felt like an adolescent, that was what was so galling. He felt like a teenager (horrendous word with its meretricious, transatlantic connotations) trying to attract the attention of some older girl, while she moved through the group of women with a disturbing, adult assurance.
    Finally she came over to him. The topic of the Roman burial ground had been exhausted. All around them the women were talking of families, of children and schools, of houses and maids and holidays. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she asked. ‘Is that allowed? What kind of family produces a priest?’
    ‘You wouldn’t want to know about my family,’ he assured her. ‘It wasn’t like yours.’
    ‘What’s that meant to mean? Wasn’t it happy? All happy families are the same, aren’t they? Where does that come from?’
    ‘Tolstoy.’
    ‘
Anna Karenina
, that’s it. All happy families are the same; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Is it true?’
    Why should she want to know? What interest could she have? The women came up to offer thanks and farewells. ‘You’ll stay for some lunch?’ she asked him.
    ‘I don’t want to overstay my welcome again.’
    She laughed, and offered no answer. He watched her smiling and laughing, shaking hands, offering a smooth cheek for a farewell kiss, two farewell kisses, one on each cheek, turning the other cheek, a consummate performance. From on top of the grand piano, framed in silver, Jack and the two girls laughed at the scene. He found himself trying to picture the small rituals of her family life, what the Brewers would do and what they would say to one another. His imagination was defective in such matters, a stunted thing with no experience to call on. It was as though he had trespassed into a foreign territory, a place with its own customs, its own language, with all the attraction of the unfamiliar. He was entranced. His own family, his tiny, fragile family was a different organism from hers, a different institution, hedged about with a past it couldn’t talk about and an inheritance it couldn’t acknowledge.
    ‘Tell me,’ Madeleine said when the last of the women had left. ‘You tell me and I’ll listen.’
    So he told her. Confession of a kind, explication and expiation woven together. He told Madeleine of his homelife, musty with the smell of a vanished past and cloying with the attentions of a pious widowed mother who brooked no interference from the outside world beyond the inattentive children who came round for piano lessons. Homes have their own smell, their own amalgam of scents and flavours: his had been redolent of incense, gathered devoutly into his mother’s clothes when she went to mass each morning and brought back to the house, to be extruded into the heavy, languorous atmosphere. A candle, burning perpetually before an icon of the Blessed Madonna and Child, added its