Cheating at Canasta

  ‘It could be lovely,’ his sister said.

  Mr Flewett was elderly, which Hester had predicted he would be. He was on his own these days, he said, bringing tea on a tray, with biscuits in a tin. He had been welcoming at the hall door, although he had examined his visitors closely before he invited them into his house.

  ‘We have the recording of the service, of course,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge of that myself. Morning prayer only.’

  Oscarey Church was one of several in a combined benefice, the most distant being seventeen miles away. ‘Too far for Canon Furney and there are a few who can’t take to the recording so they make the journey to the canon at Clonbyre or Nead. On the other hand, of course, there’s Mrs Wharton’s kindness.’

  That took some time to explain. The small scattered community of Oscarey was a mixture now of poor and better-off: besides the remnants of the estate families, there were newcomers. Mrs Wharton—no longer alive—had been one of the latter. Her will left her house and a considerable legacy to Oscarey Church, this money to provide a stipend for a suitable incumbent, the house to become Oscarey Rectory.

  ‘That’s what this is about,’ Mr Flewett went on, pouring more tea.

  Hester nodded. ‘I heard something like it,’ she said. ‘That perhaps a younger man…’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Bartholomew felt uneasy. Hester often became carried away. In the sad, grimy little church he had understood how her imagination had been excited and still was; but the poverty of the place had a finality about it; even the attempts to disguise its neglect had. There was no obvious way in which the impossible could be reversed.

  ‘The Church of Ireland moves slowly,’ Mr Flewett said. ‘I think we can agree about that. And of course Mrs Wharton died only five months ago. But time eats away at good intentions. Her wishes must be honoured. She is buried in our little graveyard.’

  ‘I think we might have noticed,’ Bartholomew said.

  ‘Canon Furney is seventy-one. He’ll not retire and there’s no reason why he should. He’s a good, dear man and no one would want him to. What we fear, though, is that when he goes, Clonbyre and Nead will be taken in with Oscarey again and Oscarey possibly abandoned, so far away we are. But Mrs Wharton’s house would be a better rectory than the one there is now at Clonbyre, and her generosity otherwise is what the benefice is crying out for.’

  ‘You’ve been very kind, Mr Flewett,’ Bartholomew said. ‘It’s been interesting. But we’ve taken up your time and we mustn’t do that.’

  ‘Indeed you haven’t. No, not at all.’

  ‘I hope it all works out for you.’

  ‘All of us at Oscarey hope that.’

  Bartholomew stood up. He held out his hand, and then Mr Flewett shook Hester’s hand too.

  ‘I meant it in my letter,’ he said. ‘Come any time. I’m always here. People will be pleased you came.’

  Hester nodded. She had a way sometimes of not smiling and she didn’t now. But she nodded again as if to make up for that.

  In the car Bartholomew said: ‘What letter?’

  Hester didn’t answer. Preoccupied, she stared ahead. It was February, too soon for spring, but fine.

  ‘Did you write to him, Hester?’

  ‘The little piece in the Gazette was about that woman leaving money and the house. It gave his name.’

  Bartholomew said nothing. His sister did things for the best: he’d always known that. It sometimes didn’t seem so, but he knew it was.

  ‘Will we have another look at the church?’ she said.

  He drew in when they came to it. The hump of earth they’d noticed, the newest of the graves, was just beginning to green over and had been tended, the grass clipped in a rectangle round it.

  ‘I hope they know what they’re doing,’ Hester said, pushing open the heavy west door. ‘I’d keep it locked myself.’

  The missionary leaflets by the collection box were smeared and dog-eared, and Bartholomew noticed now that there was bird-lime on curtains that were there instead of a door to the vestry.

  ‘I’d get rid of that coconut matting,’ Hester said.

  They didn’t stop on the way back to Dublin. Hester was quiet, as often she was, not saying anything until they were in Maunder Street. ‘I have eggs I could scramble,’ she said then, and Bartholomew followed her through the empty rooms.

  ‘How long have you left here?’ he asked, and his sister said until the end of next week. There’d been a place near Fairview Park and he asked about it. No good, she said, Drumcondra the same.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re having difficulties. I’ve kept an eye out.’

  ‘The Gas Board’ll have me back. Someone they weren’t expecting to left.’

  ‘Well, there’s that at least.’

  Hester was not enthusiastic. She didn’t say, but Bartholomew knew. In the denuded kitchen he watched while she broke the yolks of the eggs with a fork, beating them up, adding milk and butter, then sprinkling on pepper. Since their childhood he had resented, without saying it, her interference, her indignation on his behalf, her possessiveness. He had forgiven what she couldn’t help, doing so as natural in him as scorn and prickliness were in her. She had never noticed, had never been aware of how he felt.

  ‘You’d take to Oscarey,’ Hester said.

  Before Bartholomew and his sister made their lives at Oscarey, there was an inevitability about the course of events. In private, Bartholomew did not think about what was happening in terms of Hester, considering rather that this was what had been ordained for him, that Hester’s ordering of the circumstances was part of that. Fifteen years ago, when Sally Carbery had decided against marriage at the last minute it was because she feared Hester. She had been vague when suddenly she was doubtful, and was less truthful than she might have been. Unaware of that at the time, Bartholomew was bewildered; later he came to believe that in influencing Sally Carbery’s second thoughts Hester had, then too, been assigned a role in the pattern conceived by a greater wisdom. ‘Silly’, Hester’s word for Sally Carbery had been, even before Sally Carbery and Bartholomew loved one another.

  The Church approved the rescuing of Oscarey; and it was anticipated, as Mr Flewett had surmised, that when old Canon Furney died the benefice of Clonbyre, Nead and Oscarey would become one again, that the unnecessarily spacious, draughty rectory in poor repair at Clonbyre would be abandoned in favour of a smaller, more comfortable one at Oscarey. This came about, and the manner in which human existence—seeming to be shaped by the vagaries of time and chance but in fact obedient to a will—became the subject of more than one of Bartholomew’s sermons. Verses of the scriptures were called upon to lend credence to his conclusions, which more than anything else claimed that the mysterious would never be less than mysterious, would always be there, at the heart of spiritual life. That the physical presence of things, and of words and people, amounted to very little made perfect sense to Bartholomew.

  It did to Hester too. Belief was part of Hester, taken for granted, a sturdy certainty that brought her confidence and allowed her to insist she must be taken as she was, allowed her to condemn as a dishonesty any concealment of personal traits. When her brother’s fourteen parishioners at Oscarey, and the twenty-seven at Clonbyre and the eleven at Nead, came to know her there was agreement—as elsewhere there had often been before—that she and Bartholomew were far from alike. None among the parishioners feared Hester as Sally Carbery had, since none possessed a fiancée’s intuition, only strangers’ perspicacity. Sally Carbery’s fear—to do with the prospect of the future, of being more closely involved with Hester—was understandable. At Oscarey, and Clonbyre and Nead, there was only Hester as she was, a talking-point because of it.

  As the two aged, the understanding between them that had survived the cramped conditions of Maunder Street was supported by reminiscence—the smell of fresh bread every early morning, the unexpected death of their mother, their father’s mercilessly slow, the two cremations at Glasnevin. Se
aside photographs taken at Rush and Bettystown were in an album, visits to both grandmothers and to aunts were remembered; and hearing other generations talked about were. The present was kept a little at bay: that congregations everywhere continued to dwindle, that no ground had been regained by the Church or seemed likely to be, was not often mentioned. Hester was indifferent to this. Bartholomew was increasingly a prey to melancholy, but did not let it show, to Hester or to anyone.

  For her part, Hester had given herself the task of restoring Oscarey Church, scraping the tiled floor, washing the altarcloths, polishing the neglected pews and brass. The church was hers, she considered, for she had found it and brought life to it, making more of it than a mere outward and visible sign. It was not her way to say that all was well, that because of her work everything was good: there was a presumption in that she didn’t care for, and such sentiments cloyed. But as she knelt before her brother at the altar-rails, while he raised the cup or again wiped clean its rim, she knew that all this was meant to be: he was here, where he should be, and so should she, where her unyielding spirit had brought them. ‘The peace of God,’ he ended each occasion of worship, and gave his blessing. The words were special. And her brother saying them in the hush while Hester still knelt among the few who came to Oscarey Church, before the shuffling and the whispering began, was special too.

  Except at weddings and the christenings that sometimes followed them there were no young among the congregations of the three churches, and with nostalgia Bartholomew now and again remembered Youth Reach and Youth Action and the Saturday rambles to Kilmashogue and Two Rock. On Sundays when he looked down from the pulpit at aged faces, at tired eyes, heads turned to hear him better, and when his hand was afterwards shaken at the door, he sensed the hope that had flickered into life during the service: in all that was promised, in psalm and gospel, in his own interpretations, the end was not an end.

  Then—as it happened, on a Sunday night—Bartholomew, with cruel suddenness, was aware of a realization that made him feel as if he had been struck a blow so powerful it left him, though not in pain, without the normality of his faculties. This happened in his bedroom before he had begun to undress. The bedside light was on; he had closed the door, pulled down the two blinds, and was standing beside his bed, having just untied the laces of his shoes. For a moment he thought he had fallen down, but he had not. He thought he could not see, but he could see. A shoe was in one hand, which brought something of reality back, and sitting down on the edge of the bed did too. The clatter of the shoe on the linoleum when it slipped from his grasp brought more. Sensations of confusion lingered while he sat there, then were gone.

  ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven…’

  His own voice made no sense, and yet went on.

  Afterwards, Bartholomew told himself that what had occurred must surely be no more than a mood of petulance, an eruption from his half-stifled impatience with the embroidery and frills that dressed the simplicity of truth with invasive, sentimental stories that somehow made faith easier, the hymns he hated. For Bartholomew, the mystery that was the source of all spiritual belief, present through catastrophe and plague and evil, was a strength now too, and more than it had ever been. Yet there was disquiet, a stirring in his vocation he had brought upon himself and wished he had not. Seeking guidance, he dwelt on his memories of the euphoria he had been aware of when his profession had first seemed to be chosen for him. There were no reservations then, and he searched for what it was, in himself, that had allowed his unquestioning credence. But no help came from that far-off time, and Bartholomew—not knowing what he should otherwise do—continued to visit the lonely and the sick, to repeat the Te Deum, the Creed, the Litany. He felt he should not and yet he did.

  Hester noticed no change in her brother, and he had told her nothing. Her own fulfilment, through him, continued, her belief undiminished, her certainties unchallenged. In her daily life all she distrusted she still distrusted. Her eye was cold, her scorn a nourishment; and then, for Hester too when more time passed, there was adversity. She did not complain. ‘Oh, we all must die,’ she said when she learned that she was to herself, sooner than she had ever expected. A doctor whom she had hardly bothered since coming to Oscarey confirmed his first suspicions, gently taking from her the small hope he had permitted to remain since her previous visit. He told her what she had to know, and she said nothing. Afterwards, alone, she did not weep; nor did she prepare her brother for what awaited both of them. But one morning, when the remains of spring and all of summer had gone, when they were sitting in warm September sunshine in their small garden, she told him. Hester was not yet sixty then.

  Bartholomew listened with incredulous dismay. Yet Hester spoke so fearlessly, accepting as her due a simple fact, that a display of emotion on his part seemed out of place. Her tone was casual, her clasped hands still, her eyes unflinching. She did not ask for pity, she never had. The next remark she made was about their Indian summer.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bartholomew said.

  He didn’t know her: that thought came, which never had before. Her severity, the outspokenness that was natural to her, told too little. She had saved him from Sally Carbery, she would have said, believing that was the honest way to put it. He’d known in childhood that she wasn’t liked. He had tried to make it up to her, and was glad now that he had.

  But shadowing these reflections, and belittling them, was what Hester bore so stocially. It stalked the past, and was in charge of all the time that now was left. And yet, for Bartholomew, his own trouble was the greater agony; he could not help it that this was so and in a familiar manner guilt began. That day he did more in the house, taking on his sister’s tasks.

  ‘What courage you have!’ Bartholomew said when autumn had passed, and winter too.

  Hester shook her head. Courage came with misfortune; she took no credit for it. She asked for primroses and watched while Bartholomew picked them from the bank where they grew. That night they were on her bedside table, in a glass there’d been at Maunder Street.

  ‘Why did they give me that awful name?’ she asked when Bartholomew came to her later, to say goodnight. The name had come from somewhere outside the family; she wondered where. When Bartholomew was born they said it was the day the Huguenots had been slaughtered in France.

  ‘I’ve brought you Ovaltine,’ he said.

  It made her sleep, or was supposed to, but when he came with tea in the mornings he didn’t ask if she had lain awake. The nights were long. He brought the tea as early as he could.

  On Sundays she could no longer manage the journey to church; but messages came from the Oscarey parishioners, prayers were said for her. ‘O, Lord,’ she imagined Bartholomew pleading on her behalf, ‘look down from heaven, and relieve Thy servant…Look down upon her with the eyes of Thy mercy…give her comfort and sure confidence in Thee…’

  This was the form she preferred; and she knew as she lay in her bed in the stillness of the rectory that these were the words said.

  Bartholomew wondered if, afterwards, he would want to go away; if, without her, his own misfortune would be a desolation he could not bear. Back to the northside, he thought, which he knew better than the rest of Dublin. There would be employment of some kind; of any kind, he didn’t much mind what, provided only that he was capable of whatever it was. He wondered about helping in one of the shops or a bed-and-breakfast house. Middle-aged now, the youths he had worked among might be able at least to find him something, if not to employ him. And yet it seemed ridiculous that he should even consider such a dramatic move. He knew he would remain, and be silent.

  ‘How tidy it is!’ Hester murmured. ‘Living for your while, then not being there any more. How well arranged!’

  There was contentment in how she put it, and in her tone. Bartholomew sensed that and, concerned with her again, rather than with himself, he was pleased. His deception of her and of his scanty congregations would one day assault hi
s conscience, would one day make continuing impossible, but at least she would not have to know.

  When the time came, Hester knew that she would die that night.

  Bartholomew was with her. There was no sentiment, she didn’t speak, and Bartholomew sensed that there suddenly was only pain. God’s will, he knew, was what she repeated to herself, as she had since she’d realized her illness was a visitation that would only end as it was ending now. The intensity of her faith, the sureness of her trust, was unaffected by the pain she suffered, and he prayed that she would close her eyes and die. Yet she did not, and Bartholomew telephoned to request that more morphine should be brought.

  ‘No, I can manage,’ she whispered, hearing this plea, although he had made it in another room. No doctor was available; a message had had to be left. ‘Soon,’ Hester said, her voice just audible, no more. ‘It will be soon.’ She asked for Communion then.

  Outside, a frost had stayed all that day and, icing over now, still whitened the small garden, the patch of grass, the fields beyond. Bartholomew stood by the window, watching another dusk becoming dark, wishing there was not now, unknown to her, a gulf between them. Her courage was her belief, a dignity in her need, her eternal life already lit, its stately angels waiting to take her to the mansions of their paradise, and choral voices singing.

  When Bartholomew returned to the bedside she was quiet. Then she spoke incomprehensibly. She winced, her closed eyes tightening, her head jerking on the pillow; and he went again to the telephone. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please.’ But there was still a message. He said a little more, whispering now, the desperation in his voice concealed. Outside, a blackbird, tame in the garden, scratched at the frost.

  ‘Hester,’ he said, again beside her, and there was no response; he had not expected one. She would die and still be here and nowhere else: in his dissent he could not escape that. ‘There will be nothing,’ he might have said, and wanted to share with her his anguish, as she shared the ordeal of death with him.