The Cheat 

The only thing that distinguished Dick Gordon from the other young men
of my time in Cork was his attitude to religion. As an engineer he
seemed to feel that he could not afford to believe in anything but the
second law of thermodynamics: according to him, this contained
everything a man required to know.

For years he courted a girl called Joan Twomey, and everyone expected
he would marry her and settle down as most men of his kind
do. Usually, they are of a serious disposition and settle down more
easily than the rest of humanity. You often see them in their later
years, carrying round the collecting bag at twelve-o’clock Mass, and
wonder what has happened to all their wild dreams of free thought and
social justice. Marriage is the great leveller.

But Joan’s mother died, and she had to do the housekeeping for a
father and two younger sisters, so she became serious too, and there
was no more reckless behavior in the little seaside house they rented
in summer. She was afraid of marrying a man who did not believe in
anything and would probably bring up his children the same way. She
was wrong in this, because Dick was much too tolerant a man to deprive
his worst enemy of the pleasure of believing in eternal damnation,
much less his wife, but Joan’s seriousness had developed to the
dimensions of spiritual pride and she gave him up as she might have
given up some pleasure for Lent.

Dick was mystified and hurt: it was the first shock to his feeling of
the basic reasonableness of life; but he did not allow it to change
him. After all, his brother Tom was an ex-cleric and he had been
worked on by experts. Some time later he met a girl called Barbara
Hough who was a teacher in a Protestant school and started to walk out
with her. On the surface Barbara was much more his style. She was
good-looking and urbane, vaguely atheistic and left-wing in her views,
and she thought that all Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, were
quite insane on the subject of religion. All the same, for a young
fellow of good Catholic family to take up with a Protestant at all was
a challenge, and Barbara, who was a high-spirited girl, enjoyed it and
made the most of it. His friends were amused and his family
alarmed. Of course, Dick could get a dispensation if Barbara signed
the paper guaranteeing that their children would be brought up as
Catholics, but would Barbara, who was a rector’s daughter, agree to
it? Characteristically, when his brother Tom asked him this, Dick only
smiled and said, “Funny, isn’t it? I never asked her.” He would
probably have been quite safe in doing so, for though Barbara herself
did not recognize it, she had all the loneliness of one brought up in
a minority religion, always feeling that she was missing something,
and much of Dick’s appeal for her was that he was a Prince Charming
who had broken the magic circle in which she felt she would be trapped
until the day she died. But Dick did not ask her. Instead he proposed
a quiet register-office marriage in London, and she was so moved by
his consideration for her that she did not even anticipate what the
consequences might be.

You see, it was part of Dick’s simplicity of mind that he could not
realize that there were certain perfectly simple things you couldn’t
do without involving yourself in more trouble than they were worth, or
if he did see it, he underrated its importance. A few of his old
friends stood by him, but even they had to admit that there was an
impossible streak in him. When Barbara was having a baby the family
deputed his brother Tom to warn him of what he was doing. Tom was
tall, good-looking, dreamy, and morbidly sensitive. He did not want to
approach Dick at all, but seeing that he was the nearest thing to a
priest in the family, he felt that it might be his duty.

“You know what people are going to think, Dick,” he said with a
stammer.

“The same as they think now, I suppose, ” Dick replied with his gentle
smile.

“This is different, Dick.”

“How, Tom?”

“This concerns a third party, you see,” said Tom, too embarrassed even
to mention such things as babies to his brother.

“And a fourth and fifth, I hope,” Dick said cheerfully. “It’s a
natural result of marriage, you know. And children do take after their
parents, for the first few years anyway.”

“Not in this country, they don’t,” Tom said ruefully. “I suppose there
are historical reasons for it,” he added, being a great student of
history.

“There are historical reasons for everything in this country, Tom,”
said Dick with a jolly laugh. “But because some old fool believes in
the fairies for good historical reasons is no excuse for bringing up
my kids the same way. ”

“Ah, well, it’s not as foolish as all that, Dick,” said Tom, looking
more miserable than ever. “It’s poetic, or fanciful, or whatever you
like, but it’s what we were brought up to believe, and our fathers and
grandfathers before us.”

“And the monks told us that Ireland was such a holy country that we’d
have the end of the world eight years before anywhere else. ... I’m
not sure what the advantage was supposed to be. ... I don’t suppose
you still believe that?”

“Why would I?” asked Tom. “It’s not an article of faith.”

“It was an article of faith to you and me, and I wouldn’t have liked
to be the fellow that disbelieved it,” said Dick with a
sniff. “Anyway, it’s no worse than the rest of the nonsense we listen
to. That sort of thing is looked on as childishness everywhere else
today, and it’ll be looked on as childishness here, too, in your
lifetime and mine. In fifteen years’ time people will only laugh at
it.”

That was Dick all out, entirely reasonable and tolerant, and yet as
big a misfit as if he had two heads. How could any responsible
superior recommend a man as pig-headed as that for promotion? The
sensible thing for Dick would have been to emigrate and start all over
again in England or America where apparitions were not so highly
regarded, but there was a dogged, cynical streak in him that derived a
sort of morose pleasure from seeing some devotee of apparitions
promoted over his head and making a mess of some perfectly simple job.

He had a number of friends who sympathized with his views and who met
at his little house in the College Road on Sundays to discuss the
latest piece of jobbery in the University. They grew mad about it, but
Dick’s attitude of amused tolerance rarely varied. At most he sighed:
it was as though he saw things that they could not see. One old
schoolteacher called Murphy used to grow furious with him over
this. He was a gloomy-looking, handsome man who was at the same time
very pious and very anticlerical. Passion made him break out in
angles, as when he called his old friends “Mister.”

“Mister Gordon,” he shouted one night, “you’re out of your mind. A
hundred years from now the descendants of those hobblers will still be
seeing apparitions behind every bush.”

“They won’t, Ned,” Dick said with a smile. He was particularly fond of
Murphy and enjoyed seeing him in a rage.

“What’ll stop them, Mister Gordon?”

“Facts, Ned!”

“Facts!”

“Facts impose their own logic, Ned. They’re imposing it now, at this
very minute, here and everywhere, even though we may not see it. It’s
only an elaboration of skills. Skills here are still too
rudimentary. But women are beginning to do men’s work, and they’ll
have to think men’s thoughts. You can’t control that, you know. The
world you’re talking about is finished. In ten or fifteen years’ time
it’ll be a joke. Simple facts will destroy it.”



That was all very well. Dick might have a good eye for what was going
on in the outside world, but he had no eye at all for what was going
on in his own very house. One evening, after they had been married for
ten years, Dick was at home and Barbara out with their son, Tom, when
there was a knock at the door. Outside was a young priest; a tall,
thin, good-looking young man with a devil-may-care eye.

“Can I come in?” he asked, as though he had no doubt whatever of his
welcome.

“Oh, come in, come in!” said Dick with a thin smile. He hated those
embarrassing occasions when people with more self-confidence than
manners enquired how his soul was doing. He was a friendly man and did
not like to appear rude or ungrateful.

“Mrs. G. out?” the priest asked cheerfully.

“Yes, gone into town for some messages,” Dick said resignedly. “She
won’t be long.”

‘Ah, it gives us the chance of a little chat,” said the priest,
pulling at the legs of his trousers.

“Look, father, I don’t want a little chat, as you call it,” Dick said
appealingly. “This town is full of people who want little chats with
me, and they can’t understand that I don’t appreciate them. I gave up
religion when I was eighteen, and I have no intention in the world of
going back to it.”

“Did I ask you to go back to it?” the priest asked with an air of
consternation. “I wasn’t expecting to see you at all, man! I came here
to talk to your wife. You are Mrs. Gordon’s husband, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Dick replied, somewhat surprised by the priest’s tone.

“Well, she’s been receiving instruction. Didn’t you know that?”

Dick was a hard man to catch off balance, and when he replied he did
not even sound surprised.

“Instruction? No. I didn’t.”

“Crumbs, I’m after saying the wrong thing again!” the priest said
angrily. “I shouldn’t be left out without a male nurse. Look, I’m
terribly sorry. I’ll come back another time.”

“Oh, as you’re here, you may as well stay,” Dick said amiably. It was
partly pride, partly pity. He could see that the priest was genuinely
distressed.

‘Another time! Another time!”

“Who will I say called?” Dick asked as he saw him to the door.

“The name is Hogan. Mr. Gordon, I wouldn’t have wished it for a
hundred pounds.”

“It was hardly your fault,” Dick said with a friendly smile.

But as he closed the door the smile faded and he found himself cold
and shaking. He poured himself a drink but it only made him feel
sick. Nothing that could have happened to him would have been quite so
bad as this. He had been betrayed shamelessly and treacherously and he
could already see himself as the laughing stock of the city. A man’s
loneliness is his strength and only a wife can really destroy him
because only she can understand his loneliness.

He heard her key in the lock and wished he had left before her
return. He liked to be master of himself and now he feared he had no
control over what he did or said.

“Dick!” she called in her clear ringing voice and opened the
livingroom door. “Is something wrong?” she asked as he did not turn
round. “One moment, Tom!” she said to the child in the hall. “Run
upstairs and take your things off. I’ll call you when tea is
ready. Don’t argue now, sweetheart. Mummy is busy.” She closed the
door behind her and approached him. “I suppose Father Hogan called,”
she added in her weary well-bred voice. “Was that it? You should know
I intended to tell you. I wanted to make up my own mind first.” Still
he did not reply and she burst out into a wail. “Oh, Dick, I’ve tried
to tell you so often and I didn’t have the courage.”

She knew the moment he looked at her that she had fooled herself;
persuaded herself that he was dull and tolerant and gentle and that
nothing she did to him would affect their relationship. It is the weak
spot in the cheat, man and woman.

“You hadn’t the courage,” he repeated dully. “But you had the courage
to make a fool of me before your clerical friends.”

“I didn’t, Dick,” she said hotly. “But you know yourself it’s
something I can’t discuss with you. It’s a subject you can’t be
reasonable about.”

The word “reasonable” stung him.

“Is that what you call being reasonable?” he asked bitterly. “I should
have been reasonable and made you conform before I married you. I
should have been reasonable and brought Tom up as my family wanted him
brought up. Every day of my life I had to accept humiliation on your
account when I could have been reasonable about it all. And then you
don’t even have the courage to discuss with me what you’re going to do
or what the consequences will be for Tom. You prefer to bring him up
believing that his father is damned! There’s reasonableness for you!”

“But I’d discuss it with you now, Dick, if only you’d listen to me
patiently.” She began to wring her hands. “It’s not my fault if I
can’t live without believing in something.”

“In Heaven,” he said cynically.

“In Heaven, if you like. Anyway, in something for you and me and
Tom. I was brought up to believe in it, and I threw it away because I
didn’t value it, and now I need it—maybe because I haven’t anything
else. If only you wouldn’t tell me it’s all just nonsense!”

“Why should I tell you anything?” he asked. “You have better advisers
now.”

In fact, he never did discuss it with her. He even allowed Tom to go
to Mass with her and attend the local monks’ school without
protest. The older Tom was Barbara’s biggest surprise. She knew that
in arguments with Dick he had taken her side, but when they discussed
it together he seemed to judge her far more severely than Dick. It was
curious, because the diffidence, the slight stammer, the charming
smile did not change.

“Of course, Barbara, as a Catholic I am naturally pleased, for your
sake and the kid’s, but as Dick’s brother I can’t help feeling that
it’s unfortunate.”

“But don’t you think it may help Dick to see things a bit differently
in the course of time?”

“No, Barbara, I don’t,” he said with a gentle, almost pitying smile.

“But, Tom, I don’t see that it should make any more difference than it
does between you and Dick.”

“Marriage is different, Barbara,” he said, and she didn’t even see
anything peculiar about being told of marriage by a man who had almost
been given up by his own family as unmarriageable. “People don’t know
it, but they marry for protection as much as anything else, and
sometimes they have to be protected at the cost of other people’s
principles.”

“And you think Dick needs protection?” she asked wonderingly.

“I think Dick needs a great deal of protection, Barbara,” he said with
an accusing look.

There was a good deal of talk in the city, in the city, much of it
ill-natured, though on the whole it did Dick less harm than good. He
had ceased to be an active force for evil and become a mere figure of
fun, as vulnerable to ridicule as any University intriguer. It had
even become safe to promote him.

But it was old Ned Murphy who said the thing that stuck. He and two of
Dick’s other friends were drinking in a public-house one night, and
the others—Cashman and Enright, who was a bit of a smart aleck—were
making good-humored fun of Dick. Murphy alone did not laugh at all. He
scowled and rubbed his forehead with his fist till it grew inflamed.

“It’s like your wife having an affair with another man,” he said
sourly, and because he was unmarried, Cashman and Enright laughed
louder. Still there was something uncomfortably apt about the analogy;
both were married men and there had been a small scandal about
Enright’s wife, who had had an affair with a commercial
traveller. They knew there was always another man, a shadowy figure,
not real as they were, and they dreaded his presence in the
background.

“Still, you’d think he’d have given her some cause,” said Cashman.

“He gave her plenty of cause,” said Murphy.

“But they always got on well together.”

“They got on all right,” Murphy admitted. “But she must have had a
terrible life with him. She’s a religious girl.”

“Lots of religious girls marry men like that, though,” said Enright,
as though he were following the conversation, which he wasn’t.

“Not men like Dick Gordon,” Murphy said broodingly. “He’s an optimist,
and optimism is the plague of a religious mind. Dick has no notion how
intolerable life can be. A man like that doesn’t even believe in
evil.”



Dick’s optimism was tested severely enough a few years later. He was
ill, and word was going round that he would never be well again.

This put half Cork in a flutter, because everyone who had ever had a
conversation with him seemed to feel a personal responsibility for
seeing that he was converted, and those who might see him were warmly
advised of what they should do and say. His boss put a car at the
disposal of his friends so that they could rush a priest to his
bedside at any hour of the day or night. “Vultures are a breed of bird
that has always fascinated me, though I thought they were supposed to
be extinct,” said Ned Murphy.

Barbara was exasperated by all the hysteria, more particularly because
it put her in such a false position, and her replies became
shorter. “I’m afraid it is a matter I never discuss with my husband,”
she said. “There are certain things that are too personal even for a
wife.” Even that did not put people off the subject. They said that
converts were never really like their own people.

One rainy evening Dick was alone in the house, trying to read, when a
strange priest called. He was tall and fat and very grave.

“Mr. Gordon?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dick.

“Can I come in for a moment?”

“Oh, certainly. Sit down.”

“You don’t know who I am, Mr. Gordon,” the priest said jovially as he
took a chair. “I know quite a lot about you, though. I’m the parish
priest, Father Ryan.”

Dick nodded.

“Mr. Gordon, I want to talk to you about your soul,” he said with a
change of tone.

Dick smiled and lit a cigarette. He had been through it all so often.

“Surely, among your congregation you could find plenty of others,” he
suggested mildly.

“Not many in such danger, shall we say,” the priest replied with a
smile. Something about the smile shook Dick. It seemed to radiate a
sort of cold malice which was new to him.

“Considering that we’ve only just met, you seem to know a lot about
the state of my soul,” Dick said with the same weary sarcasm.

“Mr. Gordon,” the priest said, raising his hand, “I wasn’t speaking
only of your spiritual danger. Mr. Gordon, you’re a very sick man.”

Dick rose and opened the door for him.

“Father Ryan, you’re concerning yourself with things that have nothing
to do with you,” he said icily. “Now, do you mind getting out of my
house?”

“Your arrogance won’t last long, Mr. Gordon,” the priest said. “You’re
dying of cancer.”

“You heard me,” Dick said menacingly.

“You have less than three months to live.”

“All the more reason I shouldn’t be persecuted by busybodies like
you,” Dick said with sudden anger. “Now get out before I throw you
out.”

He scarcely raised his voice, but anger was so rare with him that it
had a sinister quality that overawed the priest.

“You’ll regret this,” he said.

“Probably,” Dick said between his teeth. “I’ll regret that I didn’t
treat you as you deserve.”

Afterward he went back to his book, but he was even more incapable of
reading or of understanding what he read. Something about the priest’s
tone had upset him. He was himself almost devoid of malice and had
shrugged off the opposition to himself as mere foolishness, but this
was something more and worse than foolishness. This was foolishness
going bad, foolishness turning into naked evil. And Dick, as Ned
Murphy had said, did not really believe in evil.

When Barbara came in he was still sitting in darkness before the fire,
brooding.

“Hello, dear,” she said with false brightness. “All alone?”

“Except for a clerical gentleman who just called,” he said with an air
of amusement.

“Oh, dear!’ she said in distress. ““Who was it?”

“His name is Ryan. A rather unusual character.”

“What did he want?”

“Oh, just to tell me I had cancer and had less than three months to
live,” Dick said bitterly.

“Oh, God, no, Dick! He didn’t say that?” she cried, and began to weep.

He looked at her in surprise and concern and then got up.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Babs!” he said with a shrug. “It’s only
their stock in trade, you know. You should have heard the pleasure
with which he said it! Where would they be without their skeleton to
brandish?”

It was only the sort of thing he had said to her in the early days of
their marriage and had not said since her conversion. She did not know
whether he really meant it or said it just to comfort her. After their
years of married life he was still gentle and considerate. His brother
Tom was little help to her.

“I’ll only have to try and be at the house more,” he said
gloomily. “This thing could happen again.”

“But can’t we complain to the Bishop about it?” she said angrily.

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t do much good, Barbara. The Bishop would be
more likely to take Father Ryan’s side. By the way, have you
confidence in that doctor of yours?”

“Dr. Cullen? Oh, I suppose he did what he could.”

“I don’t mean that,” Tom said patiently. “Are you sure he didn’t go to
Father Ryan himself?”

“Oh, God, Tom!” she said. ““What sort of people are they?”

“Much like people anywhere else, I suppose,” he said despondently.

After this, she dreaded leaving Dick alone. She knew now the hysteria
that surrounded them and knew that those who indulged in it were
ruthless in a way that Dick would never understand.

One day she was upstairs chatting with him when the doorbell rang.
She answered it and saw Father Hogan outside. He was now parish priest
in a village ten miles outside the town, and they saw less of him. He
was one of the few friends she had whom Dick seemed to like.

“Come in here, please, father,” she said, and led him into the little
front room. She closed the door and spoke in a low voice. “Father, I
can’t have Dick persecuted now.”

“Persecuted?” he asked in surprise. “Who’s persecuting him?”

“You know what he believes,” she said. “I daresay he’s wrong, and if
you catch him in a moment of weakness he may say he’s wrong, but it
will be his weakness, not him.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked angrily. “Are you out
of your mind? I rang him up when I heard he was sick, and he asked me
to call for a drink. I’m not going to do anything to him—except maybe
give him conditional absolution when it’s all over, and that won’t be
on his account. There are people in this town who’d try to refuse him
Christian burial. You don’t know it, but you wouldn’t like it. No more
would his family.”

“You had nothing to do with the man who told him he was dying?”

“Why?” he asked quietly. “Did someone do that?”

“The parish priest did it.”

“And am I to be held responsible for every fool and lout who happens
to wear a soutane?” he asked bitterly. “He asked me in for a drink,
Barbara, and I’m going to have it with him, whatever you may
think. ...” Then with one of his quick changes of mood he asked, “Did
it upset him?”

“Fortunately, he didn’t believe it.”

“Didn’t believe it, or pretended not to believe it?” he asked shrewdly
and then threw the question away. “Ah, how would you know? I won’t
disturb him, Barbara,” he added gently. “I wish I was as sure of my
own salvation as I am of his.”

“So do I—now,” she said, and he knew as though he were inside her
that she was regretting the weakness of years before and wishing that
she could go into the dark with her husband as they had both imagined
it when they were young and in love. It was the only way that would
have meant anything to Dick now. But he was a good priest and he could
not afford to brood on what it all meant. He still had a duty to the
living as well as to the friend who was about to die.


159
(1965)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981