‘Father Gowan and I had a chat,’ Frances had said, and she’d had a chat as well with Alice Pratt’s mother. A month later Alice Pratt married the Catholic boy, but to this day attended St Michael’s every Sunday, the children going to Father Gowan. Mrs Tobin was given Hail Marys to say by the priest; Mr Willoughby agreed that his father had years ago granted Eugene Dunlevy the grazing rights. Everything, in these cases and in many others, had come out all right in the end: order emerged from the confusion that Canon Moran so disliked, and it was Frances who had always begun the process, though no one ever said in the rectory that she understood the mystery of people as well as he understood the teachings of the New Testament. She’d been a freckle-faced girl when he’d married her, pretty in her way. He was the one with the brains.
Frances had seen human frailty everywhere: it was weakness in people, she said, that made them what they were as much as strength did. And she herself had her own share of such frailty, falling short in all sorts of ways of the God’s image her husband preached about. With the small amount of housekeeping money she could be allowed she was a spendthrift, and she said she was lazy. She loved clothes and often overreached herself on visits to Dublin; she sat in the sun while the rectory gathered dust and the garden became rank; it was only where people were concerned that she was practical. But for what she was her husband had loved her with unobtrusive passion for fifty years, appreciating her conversation and the help she’d given him because she could so easily sense the truth. When he’d found her dead in the garden one morning he’d felt he had lost some part of himself.
Though many months had passed since then, the trouble was that Frances hadn’t yet become a ghost. Her being alive was still too recent, the shock of her death too raw. He couldn’t distance himself; the past refused to be the past. Often he thought that her fingerprints were still in the rectory, and when he picked the grapes or cut the grass of the lawn it was impossible not to pause and remember other years. Autumn had been her favourite time.
‘Of course I’d come,’ he said. ‘Of course, dear. Of course.’
‘I haven’t treated you very well.’
‘It’s over and done with, Deirdre.’
She smiled, and it was nice to see her smile again, although it was strange to be sitting in the back bar of a public house in Enniscorthy. He saw her looking at him, her eyes passing over his clerical collar and black clothes, and his quiet face. He could feel her thinking that he had aged, and putting it down to the death of the wife he’d been so fond of.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t write,’ she said.
‘You explained in your letter, Deirdre.’
‘It was ages before I knew about it. That was an old address you wrote to.’
‘I guessed.’
In turn he examined her. Years ago she’d had her long hair cut. It was short now, like a black cap on her head. And her face had lost its chubbiness; hollows where her cheeks had been made her eyes more dominant, pools of seaweed green. He remembered her child’s stocky body, and the uneasy adolescence that had spoilt the family’s serenity. Her voice had lost its Irish intonation.
‘I’d have met you off the boat, you know.’
‘I didn’t want to bother you with that.’
‘Oh, now, it isn’t far, Deirdre.’
She drank Irish whiskey, and smoked a brand of cigarettes called Three Castles. He’d asked for a mineral himself, and the woman serving them had brought him a bottle of something that looked like water but which fizzed up when she’d poured it. A kind of lemonade he imagined it was, and didn’t much care for it.
‘I have grapes for Mrs Neary,’ he said.
‘Who’s that?’
‘She has a shop in Slaney Street. We always sold her the grapes. You remember?’
She didn’t, and he reminded her of the vine in the greenhouse. A shop surely wouldn’t be open at this hour of the evening, she said, forgetting that in a country town of course it would be. She asked if the cinema was still the same in Enniscorthy, a cement building halfway up a hill. She said she remembered bicycling home from it at night with her sisters, not being able to keep up with them. She asked after her sisters and he told her about the two marriages that had taken place since she’d left: she had in-laws she’d never met, and nephews and a niece.
They left the bar, and he drove his dusty black Vauxhall straight to the small shop he’d spoken of. She remained in the car while he carried into the shop two large chip-baskets full of grapes. Afterwards Mrs Neary came to the door with him.
‘Well, is that Deirdre?’ she said as Deirdre wound down the window of the car. ‘I’d never know you, Deirdre.’
‘She’s come back for a little while,’ Canon Moran explained, raising his voice a little because he was walking round the car to the driver’s seat as he spoke.
‘Well, isn’t that grand?’ said Mrs Neary.
Everyone in Enniscorthy knew Deirdre had just gone off, but it didn’t matter now. Mrs Neary’s husband, who was a red-cheeked man with a cap, much smaller than his wife, appeared beside her in the shop doorway. He inclined his head in greeting, and Deirdre smiled and waved at both of them. Canon Moran thought it was pleasant when she went on waving while he drove off.
In the rectory he lay wakeful that night, his mind excited by Deirdre’s presence. He would have loved Frances to know, and guessed that she probably did. He fell asleep at half past two and dreamed that he and Frances were young again, that Deirdre was still a baby. The freckles on Frances’s face were out in profusion, for they were sitting in the sunshine in the garden, tea things spread about them, the children playing some game among the shrubs. It was autumn then also, the last of the September heat. But because he was younger in his dream he didn’t feel part of the season himself, or sense its melancholy.
A week went by. The time passed slowly because a lot was happening, or so it seemed. Deirdre insisted on cooking all the meals and on doing the shopping in Boharbawn’s single shop or in Enniscorthy. She still smoked her endless cigarettes, but the peakiness there had been in her face when she’d first arrived wasn’t quite so pronounced – or perhaps, he thought, he’d become used to it. She told him about the different jobs she’d had in London and the different places she’d lived in, because on the postcards she’d occasionally sent there hadn’t been room to go into detail. In the rectory they had always hoped she’d managed to get a training of some sort, though guessing she hadn’t. In fact, her jobs had been of the most rudimentary kind: as well as her spell in the egg-packing factory, there’d been a factory that made plastic earphones, a cleaning job in a hotel near Euston, and a year working for the Use-Us Office Cleansing Service. ‘But you can’t have liked any of that work, Deirdre?’ he suggested, and she agreed she hadn’t.
From the way she spoke he felt that that period of her life Was over: adolescence was done with, she had steadied and taken stock. He didn’t suggest to her that any of this might be so, not wishing to seem either too anxious or too pleased, but he felt she had returned to the rectory in a very different frame of mind from the one in which she’d left it. He imagined she would remain for quite a while, still taking stock, and in a sense occupying her mother’s place. He thought he recognized in her a loneliness that matched his own, and he wondered if it was a feeling that their loneliness might be shared which had brought her back at this particular time. Sitting in the drawing-room while she cooked or washed up, or gathering grapes in the greenhouse while she did the shopping, he warmed delightedly to this theme. It seemed like an act of God that their circumstances should interlace this autumn. By Christmas she would know what she wanted to do with her life, and in the spring that followed she would perhaps be ready to set forth again. A year would have passed since the death of Frances.
‘I have a friend,’ Deirdre said when they were having a cup of coffee together in the middle of one morning. ‘Someone who’s been good to me.’
She had carried a tray to where he was composing next
week’s sermon, sitting on the wooden seat by the lawn at the front of the house. He laid aside his exercise book, and a pencil and a rubber. ‘Who’s that?’ he inquired.
‘Someone called Harold.’
He nodded, stirring sugar into his coffee.
‘I want to tell you about Harold, Father. I want you to meet him.’
‘Yes, of course.’
She lit a cigarette. She said, ‘We have a lot in common. I mean, he’s the only person…’
She faltered and then hesitated. She lifted her cigarette to her lips and drew on it.
He said, ‘Are you fond of him, Deirdre?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Another silence gathered. She smoked and drank her coffee. He added more sugar to his.
‘Of course I’d like to meet him,’ he said.
‘Could he come to stay with us, Father? Would you mind? Would it be all right?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. I’d be delighted.’
Harold was summoned, and arrived at Rosslare a few days later. In the meantime Deirdre had explained to her father that her friend was an electrician by trade and had let it fall that he was an intellectual kind of person. She borrowed the old Vauxhall and drove it to Rosslare to meet him, returning to the rectory in the early evening.
‘How d’you do?’ Canon Moran said, stretching out a hand in the direction of an angular youth with a birthmark on his face. His dark hair was cut very short, cropped almost. He was wearing a black leather jacket.
‘I’m fine,’ Harold said.
‘You’ve had a good journey?’
‘Lousy,’ smatter of fact, Mr Moran.’
Harold’s voice was strongly Cockney, and Canon Moran wondered if Deirdre had perhaps picked up some of her English vowel sounds from it. But then he realized that most people in London would speak like that, as people did on the television and the wireless. It was just a little surprising that Harold and Deirdre should have so much in common, as they clearly had from the affectionate way they held one another’s hand. None of the other Moran girls had gone in so much for holding hands in front of the family.
He was to sit in the drawing-room, they insisted, while they made supper in the kitchen, so he picked up the Irish Times and did as he was bidden. Half an hour later Harold appeared and said that the meal was ready: fried eggs and sausages and bacon, and some tinned beans. Canon Moran said grace.
Having stated that County Wexford looked great, Harold didn’t say much else. He didn’t smile much, either. His afflicted face bore an edgy look, as if he’d never become wholly reconciled to his birthmark. It was like a scarlet map on his left cheek, a shape that reminded Canon Moran of the toe of Italy. Poor fellow, he thought. And yet a birthmark was so much less to bear than other afflictions there could be.
‘Harold’s fascinated actually,’ Deirdre said, ‘by Ireland.’
Her friend didn’t add anything to that remark for a moment, even though Canon Moran smiled and nodded interestedly. Eventually Harold said, ‘The struggle of the Irish people.’
‘I didn’t know a thing about Irish history,’ Deirdre said. ‘I mean, not anything that made sense.’
The conversation lapsed at this point, leaving Canon Moran greatly puzzled. He began to say that Irish history had always been of considerable interest to him also, that it had a good story to it, its tragedy uncomplicated. But the other two didn’t appear to understand what he was talking about and so he changed the subject. It was a particularly splendid autumn, he pointed out.
‘Harold doesn’t go in for anything like that,’ Deirdre replied.
During the days that followed Harold began to talk more, surprising Canon Moran with almost everything he said. Deirdre had been right to say he was fascinated by Ireland, and it wasn’t just a tourist’s fascination. Harold had read widely: he spoke of ancient battles, and of the plantations of James I and Elizabeth, of Robert Emmet and the Mitchelstown martyrs, of Pearse and de Valera. ‘The struggle of the Irish people’ was the expression he most regularly employed. It seemed to Canon Moran that the relationship between Harold and Deirdre had a lot to do with Harold’s fascination, as though his interest in Deirdre’s native land had somehow caused him to become interested in Deirdre herself.
There was something else as well. Fascinated by Ireland, Harold hated his own country. A sneer whispered through his voice when he spoke of England: a degenerate place, he called it, destroyed by class-consciousness and the unjust distribution of wealth. He described in detail the city of Nottingham, to which he appeared to have a particular aversion. He spoke of unnecessary motorways and the stupidity of bureaucracy, the stifling presence of a Royal family. ‘You could keep an Indian village,’ he claimed, ‘on what those corgis eat. You could house five hundred homeless in Buckingham Palace.’ There was brainwashing by television and the newspaper barons. No ordinary person had a chance because pap was fed to the ordinary person, a deliberate policy going back into Victorian times when education and religion had been geared to the enslavement of minds. The English people had brought it on themselves, having lost their spunk, settling instead for consumer durables. ‘What better can you expect,’ Harold demanded, ‘after the hypocrisy of that empire the bosses ran?’
Deirdre didn’t appear to find anything specious in this line of talk, which surprised her father. ‘Oh, I wonder about that,’ he said himself from time to time, but he said it mildly, not wishing to cause an argument, and in any case his interjections were not acknowledged. Quite a few of the criticisms Harold levelled at his own country could be levelled at Ireland also and, Canon Moran guessed, at many countries throughout the world. It was strange that the two neighbouring islands had been so picked out, although once Germany was mentioned and the point made that developments beneath the surface there were a hopeful sign, that a big upset was on the way.
‘We’re taking a walk,’ Harold said one afternoon. ‘She’s going to show me Kinsella’s Barn.’
Canon Moran nodded, saying to himself that he disliked Harold. It was the first time he had admitted it, but the feeling was familiar. The less generous side of his nature had always emerged when his daughters brought to the rectory the men they’d become friendly with or even proposed to marry. Emma, the eldest girl, had brought several before settling in the end for Thomas. Linda had brought only John, already engaged to him. Una had married Carley not long after the death, and Carley had not yet visited the rectory: Canon Moran had met him in Dublin, where the wedding had taken place, for in the circumstances Una had not been married from home. Carley was an older man, an importer of tea and wine, stout and flushed, certainly not someone Canon Moran would have chosen for his second-youngest daughter. But, then, he had thought the same about Emma’s Thomas and about Linda’s John.
Thomas was a farmer, sharing a sizeable acreage with his father in Co. Meath. He always brought to mind the sarcasm of an old schoolmaster who in Canon Moran’s distant schooldays used to refer to a gang of boys at the back of the classroom as ‘farmers’ sons’, meaning that not much could be expected of them. It was an inaccurate assumption but even now, whenever Canon Moran found himself in the company of Thomas, he couldn’t help recalling it. Thomas was mostly silent, with a good-natured smile that came slowly and lingered too long. According to his father, and there was no reason to doubt the claim, he was a good judge of beef cattle.
Linda’s John was the opposite. Wiry and suave, he was making his way in the Bank of Ireland, at present stationed in Waterford. He had a tiny orange-coloured moustache and was good at golf. Linda’s ambition for him was that he should become the Bank of Ireland’s manager in Limerick or Galway, where the insurances that went with the position were particularly lucrative. Unlike Thomas, John talked all the time, telling jokes and stories about the Bank of Ireland’s customers.
‘Nothing is perfect,’ Frances used to say, chiding her husband for an uncharitableness he did his best to combat. He disliked being so particular about the men his daughters
chose, and he was aware that other people saw them differently: Thomas would do anything for you, John was fun, the middle-aged Carley laid his success at Una’s feet. But whoever the husbands of his daughters had been, Canon Moran knew he’d have felt the same. He was jealous of the husbands because ever since his daughters had been born he had loved them unstintingly. When he had prayed after Frances’s death he’d felt jealous of God, who had taken her from him.
‘There’s nothing much to see,’ he pointed out when Harold announced that Deirdre was going to show him Kinsella’s Barn. ‘Just the ruin of a wall is all that’s left.’
‘Harold’s interested, Father.’
They set off on their walk, leaving the old clergyman ashamed that he could not like Harold more. It wasn’t just his griminess: there was something sinister about Harold, something furtive about the way he looked at you, peering at you cruelly out of his afflicted face, not meeting your eye. Why was he so fascinated about a country that wasn’t his own? Why did he refer so often to ‘Ireland’s struggle’ as if that struggle particularly concerned him? He hated walking, he had said, yet he’d just set out to walk six miles through woods and fields to examine a ruined wall.
Canon Moran had wondered as suspiciously about Thomas and John and Carley, privately questioning every statement they made, finding hidden motives everywhere. He’d hated the thought of his daughters being embraced or even touched, and had forced himself not to think about that. He’d prayed, ashamed of himself then, too. ‘It’s just a frailty in you,’ Frances had said, her favourite way of cutting things down to size.
He sat for a while in the afternoon sunshine, letting all of it hang in his mind. It would be nice if they quarrelled on their walk. It would be nice if they didn’t speak when they returned, if Harold simply went away. But that wouldn’t happen, because they had come to the rectory with a purpose. He didn’t know why he thought that, but he knew it was true: they had come for a reason, something that was all tied up with Harold’s fascination and with the kind of person Harold was, with his cold eyes and his afflicted face.