The Heather Blazing (11 page)

Somehow here in the middle of the night with the moths
and midges drawn to the window, the idea of God seemed more clearly absurd to him than ever before; the idea of a being whose mind put order on the universe, who watched over things, and whose presence gave the world a morality which was not based on self-interest, seemed beyond belief. He wondered how people put their faith in such a thing, and yet he understood that the courts and the law ultimately depended for their power on such an idea. He crossed out the word “God.” He felt powerless and strange as he went back to read random passages of his judgment. He felt a need to go to bed and sleep some more: maybe he would be more relaxed about his judgment in the morning.

Carmel did not stir in the bed when he came into the bedroom, but he knew that she had woken. When he got into bed he put his arms around her. She kissed him gently on the neck and then turned away from him, letting him snuggle against her. She fell back asleep, and he lay there for a while holding her until he grew drowsy and fell asleep as well.

He was wakened by the alarm clock and reached across her to turn it off. They both lay there without moving or speaking, as though still asleep.

“Are you in court today?” she finally asked, almost whispering.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you have a full day?”

“There's a lot of work to get through.”

Another last day of term; he hoped that all the urgent applications for injunctions would go elsewhere. He knew that the press would be in his court today. This case was newsworthy. He hated the journalists' faces looking up at him, eager for something instant which they could grasp and simplify. He snoozed for a while and when he woke he found that Carmel had left the bed. He moved over to her side and lay in her heat until he knew that it was time to get up.

It was a fine morning. Thin wisps of white cloud hung in
the sky like smoke, and the sun was already strong. He realized as he tested the water in the shower that he would like to get into his car now and drive with Carmel to Cush and never set foot in the court again.

She was still in her dressing-gown when he came downstairs. She poured tea for him.

“I think everything is ready now,” she said. “Are you looking forward to getting away?”

“Yes, I am. I was just thinking that I'd be delighted never to set foot in the court again.”

“You'll feel differently at the end of the summer.”

He went into his study again and sat at the desk. The judgment still lay there. He thought that he should read it over again before going into the court, but he could not face it. He felt unsure about it, but as he left the house and drove into the city the uncertainty became deep unease. It was not yet nine o'clock when he arrived at the Four Courts, and he was not due to deliver his judgment until eleven, or maybe later, depending on what injunctions were being sought.

The line of reason in his judgment was clear, he thought. It had not been written in a hurry; evening after evening he had sat in his study and drafted it, working out the possibilities, checking the evidence and going over the facts. Even so, he was still not sure.

He stood at the window of his chambers and looked out at the river which was low now because of the tide and because of the good summer. He watched a boy moving between lorries and cars on a horse, riding bareback with confidence. When the lights changed to green, the boy and his horse joined the flow of traffic towards Capel Street.

He had taken the judgment from his briefcase and placed it on the table. He went over and looked at it again. It was, he thought, merely a case of unfair dismissal, an appeal from the Employment Appeals Tribunal. It was simply his job to decide if the woman had been unfairly dismissed or not,
if she deserved compensation, or if she should get her job back.

The case had happened in one of the border towns. A lot of people must live on the edge there, he thought, with strange upheavals, odd comings and goings. But this had nothing to do with the case as far as he was concerned, he knew that she had been involved in politics, he had read that in the newspapers; she had been part of the hunger strike campaign, she had canvassed for Sinn Fein. She was well known from pickets and platforms. But none of this was germane to the case.

She had become pregnant and she had moved in with the father of her child, himself married with children of his own, his wife having left him. Was she right to do this? He tapped the desk with a fingernail before answering to himself. There was no law to stop her. But, all the same, nothing in the Constitution offered her encouragement. She was not acting according to the Christian principles outlined in the preamble to the Constitution, nor was she offered the protection which the Constitution offered to any member of a family. No judgment thus far in the history of the Constitution and the courts had called what she was involved in “a family.” It was, instead, a broken family. Her child would be illegitimate in the eyes of the state. But she was not breaking the law by living with this man, or by having a child. The law offered her the same protection as any other citizen. Her rights under the law were only diminished when those rights came into conflict with another's rights.

The school had sacked her, and since she was not a member of a trade union, she could only go to the courts to seek redress. Counsel for the school had maintained that she was not fit to be a teacher in a religious school, that her personal life was in breach of the school's ethos and articles of association. Her having a child outside wedlock was not the issue, counsel had maintained, but her continuing to live openly with a married man was. She had been warned, he said,
but she had continued, in full knowledge of her employers' wishes, to act against them. The parents of children under her care had complained, counsel for the school had emphasized.

Who was right? He had spent three days listening to the evidence and the arguments and then six weeks working towards a conclusion, a judgment. He remembered how calm the head nun had been when she came to give evidence, and how the teacher, too, had been direct. There was a pride, almost a nobility in the way they spoke. He realized that this was one of the few cases in which he had ever been involved where both sides were clearly telling the truth and were not afraid of the truth. Both women were sincere; neither wished to hide anything, except one had no job now, and wanted the court to right the wrong which she felt had been done to her.

He remembered their faces, the teacher much older than he had expected, the nun younger-looking. He took notes, asked questions, sought clarifications. He forced the teacher's counsel to admit that there was no absolute right to employment and that employers had the right, under several acts, to dispose of the services of an employee. But the counsel had continued to argue that living with a married man did not constitute grounds for dismissal.

Counsel for the nuns asked the court how a pregnant teacher living with a married man in a small town could not convey some of her ethos to the students. Surely, he argued, teaching involved more than giving information to young people? Surely the ethos of the school was clear to her from the beginning? Surely she knew what she was doing? Surely the manager of the school could not have done otherwise than dismiss her?

There was no argument about facts or truth, guilt or innocence. In the end he was not the legal arbiter, because there were no legal issues at stake. Most of the issues raised in the case were moral issues: the right of an ethos to prevail
against the right of an individual not to be dismissed from her job. Basically, he was being asked to decide how life should be conducted in a small town. He smiled to himself at the thought and shook his head.

As he worked on the judgment he realized more than ever that he had no strong moral views, that he had ceased to believe in anything. But he was careful in writing the judgment not to make this clear. The judgment was the only one which he could have given: it was cogent, well-argued and, above all, plausible.

He went to the window again and stood there looking out. How hard it was to be sure! It was not simply the case, and the complex questions it raised about society and morality, it was the world in which these things happened which left him uneasy, a world in which opposite values lived so close to each other. Which world was the one that could claim a right to be protected?

He went over to his bookshelves and took down his sacred text: the Irish Constitution,
Bunreacht na hEireann.
This contained the governing principles to which the law was subject. The preamble was clear about the Christian nature of the state, it specifically referred to the Holy Trinity. He thought about it again: to become pregnant outside marriage and to live with a man already married was clearly alien to Christian principles. It had never been accepted in any Christian society, he thought, until he realized that he had taken the argument too far. What was a Christian society? Had there ever been one?

The nuns ran a school which was dedicated to the spread of Christian principles. What right did a teacher have who was knowingly in breach of those principles?

His tipstaff came with tea. He began to think again; he wrote down three words on a notepad: charity, mercy, forgiveness. These words had no legal status, they belonged firmly to the language of Christianity, but they had a greater
bearing on the case than any set of legal terms. If the teacher were merely pregnant, the nun had said, they could have forgiven her, but the fact that she continued to transgress—he wrote the word down with an exclamation mark after it—meant that they had to take action.

One other matter began to preoccupy him. The family, according to the Constitution, was the basic unit in society. What was a family? The Constitution did not define a family, and at the time it was written, in 1937, the term was perfectly understood: a man and his wife and their children. But the Constitution was written in the present tense, it was not his job to decide what certain terms—he wrote “certain terms” in his notepad, underlined it and wrote “uncertain terms” below that—such as “the family” had meant in the past. It was his job to know what these terms meant now. This woman was living with a man in a permanent relationship, they were bringing up children. Did a man, a woman and their children not constitute a family? In what way were they not a family? They were not married. But there was no mention of marriage in the Constitution.

He thought about it for a while and the consternation it would cause among his colleagues, a redefinition of the concept of the family. The teacher would have to win the case then, and the nuns would have to lose. The idea seemed suddenly plausible, but it would need a great deal of thought and research. It had not been raised as a possibility by counsel for the teacher. Lawyers, he thought, knew that he was not the sort of judge who would entertain such far-fetched notions in his court.

If he were another person he could write the judgment, but as eleven o'clock grew near he knew that the verdict he had written out on his foolscap pages was the one he would deliver, and it would be viewed by his colleagues as eminently sensible and well-reasoned. But he was still unhappy about the case because he had been asked to interpret more than the
law, and he was not equipped to be a moral arbiter. He was not certain about right and wrong, and he realized that this was something he would have to keep hidden from the court.

The downstairs corridors of the Four Courts were like some vast marketplace. He had to push his way through the passage leading to the side door of his court.

“The courtroom is packed, my lord,” his tipstaff said.

“Are we ready then?” he asked.

He tried to act as businesslike as possible when he came into the courtroom and everybody stood up. He sat down, arranged his papers in front of him, put on his reading glasses and consulted with the clerk, learning that there were several barristers seeking injunctions. He tried to deal with them promptly, realizing that, if he hurried, he could be finished by one o'clock, which meant that he could be in Cush by four, or half past four, and if the weather was warm enough he could have a swim. He told the clerk that he was ready to begin the judgment. He surveyed the court for a moment: the press benches were full as he had expected, and the public benches were also full. There were a lot of young women, he noted, and he presumed that they were friends and supporters of the sacked teacher. He knew that this judgment would be news. It would be carried on the radio and there would probably be editorials in the newspapers. He would certainly be attacked in
The Irish Times.
As he settled down to read the judgment, sure now of his conclusions, he thought about how ill-informed and ignorant the comment would be, and how little of the processes of law the writers would understand.

He did not intend his judgment to be dramatic, but he wished to set out the facts first, clearly and exactly. The argument at times, he knew, was close and dense and it would be difficult for most people in the court to follow, but a great deal of it was clear. After half an hour, when he had set out the facts and paused for a drink of water, he was aware that no
one in the court knew which side he was about to come down on. He could feel the tension; and the few times he looked up he could see them watching him carefully. He caught the teacher's eye only once: she had the resigned look, he felt, of someone who knew that she was going to lose. People would have warned her that he was not a judge who would rule in her favour.

As he read on and came near the passage which would make the result clear he found that he was enjoying the tension and noticed that he had begun to speak more clearly and distinctly, but he stopped himself and went back to the rigorous monotone which he had adopted at the beginning.

A murmur started in the court as soon as it became clear that he had decided in favour of the nuns; from the bench it sounded like the murmur in a film, and he felt that he should bang the desk with a gavel and shout “Order in the court,” but he continued as though there had not been a sound.