The letters were punctuated by words Stefan didn’t quite understand, but every so often there was something familiar about the closeness of a community that was both a part of the world around it and at the same time engaged in its own private rituals and habits. Catholic Ireland was a public event, but his own childhood, especially the teenage years, when his Sunday mornings still belonged to the Church of Ireland, didn’t feel very different to some of Susan Field’s memories. There was the same mix of boredom, irritation and impatience; there was the same sense of something apart. He looked out of the window, seeing the water of the Slaney for the first time, and to the east the round-topped Wicklow Mountains. He played no part in all that now. He couldn’t remember when he last sat in the church by the river in Baltinglass. Yet he still knew that what his father always said was true; it wasn’t just a more private way of looking at the world; it was about keeping your head down. His parents still did keep their heads down.
By the end of the first few letters Susan Field’s swirling narrative had moved from the past to new excitement about being at University College Dublin. He knew her better here. And he still felt the closeness between her and Hannah. There was a letter that ended with a paragraph of invective about a priest who was lecturing on medieval philosophy. He was arrogant, supercilious and never listened to what anybody else said. Fierce intelligence and blind faith. Didn’t the first mean you shouldn’t be a prisoner of the second? How could you argue with someone whose ideas admitted no doubt? In the letters that followed, her irritation with the man she started to refer to jokingly as ‘John’ was replaced by an admiration that was already about something else altogether. She had done more than find his doubts.
He came to the pub with us. I don’t know why. He never did before. I started arguing with him, mostly about how his lectures infuriated me. But he wasn’t as stuffy as the stuff he spouts. I don’t mean he doesn’t believe things I could never believe, but he was so much sharper and funnier than in college. He’s full of questions about what he believes after all. He’s obviously committed to being a priest, but he said he wasn’t sure he would have become one, if he’d thought the way he thinks now. Anyway, we ended up talking on our own, after the others all went. And when the pub closed we walked round Dublin for hours and hours, just talking and talking. I think he’s probably a bit of a mess underneath. I quite like that really!
Soon the world of the family and friends Hannah and Susan shared had almost disappeared from the letters; so too had the references to what Hannah’s letters must have contained about her life in Palestine. Stefan was very aware of that. He found himself scanning the later letters, not for the pieces of the jigsaw he was actually meant to be putting together, but for the pieces of the other one, the one that was about Hannah Rosen. Sometimes there was still a glimpse of that, buried among her friend’s preoccupations.
When I met John tonight we didn’t talk very much. We finally did what we’d both wanted to do at the end of that first night, when we walked through Dublin. You always tell me I use the word love too easily. You don’t even like using it when you’re talking about Benny, and you’re marrying him! Tell me which of us is the more confused? Anyway, I’ll pretend I’m not talking about love even if I am. You’re the only person I can say all this to. I quite like how secretive and exciting it all is. Sounds a bit daft of course. I know you’ll think so! But then you’ve got a nation to build. You’ve got to be serious. I don’t suppose it’ll last long – after all he is a priest! It’ll get a lot less exciting once guilt catches up with him. But just now he hasn’t got time!
As the letters went on they were less and less about excitement and more about unhappiness and isolation – from her family and her community, even from the friends she had at UCD. It seemed to Stefan as if some of the things Susan said suggested that Hannah reciprocated those feelings at times – not of unhappiness perhaps, but at least of uncertainty. Soon, however, there was scarcely any room in Susan Field’s letters for anybody else, even her best friend. And then, in middle of it all, she found out she was pregnant.
Well, I told him. He started on about leaving the priesthood and meeting his obligations. God, the only thing worse than the mess I’m in is the thought of a lifetime with a man who’s ‘meeting his obligations’. I just shut him up, but then he surprised me. He asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, and when I told him I didn’t, he said he’d help. There’s a man in Merrion Square, a proper doctor I think, German, all very private and swanky. He knows somebody John knows. I don’t know how. I can’t say I care. I’ve seen him and it’s all very easy. It’ll be sorted out next week. John and I won’t see each other again. He’s leaving UCD. It seems a long time since we felt happy with each other. I’m not sure we ever did, whatever we told ourselves.
The last two letters were much shorter. The animation that had filled the others, even when she was writing about unhappiness, had been drained out of her. There was only emptiness. Now she just wanted it over with.
Merrion Square tomorrow. I don’t know what then. It was all about nothing in the end. In between I seem to have lost touch with all the things I cared about. I can’t even remember what they were. I’m a long way from everyone. I wish you were closer, Hannah. I suppose the blues are inevitable. But they’ll go, I guess. By the way, if I use the word love too much, you don’t use it enough. If you don’t love Benny, then making the desert bloom and filling it with babies won’t be enough. I don’t know so much about myself any more, but I know that about you. Anyway, here I go!
That was the final letter. It was dated the twenty-fifth of July. The end was bleaker than Hannah had made it sound. He knew what darkness was, and he could feel it in Susan Field’s final letter. There was a time when he had thought about walking away from it all. In Ireland the boat to somewhere was always an option; for some it offered new hope, for others it was the final expression of despair. He had even thought about another journey once, the darkest journey. For the Greeks you took a boat for that one too. It had been no more than a thought that he left behind. He had his son Tom to pull him out. What did Susan Field have? In that last letter it didn’t feel like very much.
6. Kilranelagh Hill
As the train pulled into the station at Baltinglass it followed the road and the River Slaney, black now under still thickening cloud. Beyond the river, Baltinglass Hill rose up above the town, a great pyramid of green. Three thousand years ago the people who lived there had buried their dead on its slopes and had looked down from the stone fort at the summit, as a new people arrived. The newcomers had probably followed the river too. And then the people who watched from the fort were gone, even the words of their language had disappeared, unremembered for thousands of years. They left only the ring of stones on the hilltop and the megaliths that once covered their dead.
Stefan put Susan Field’s letters into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He looked across the river at the hill he had climbed so many times as a boy, and at the ruins of the abbey that had stood below it for a thousand years, sitting next to the small Church of Ireland church that had replaced it. The abbey was not quite forgotten, but it was another place of tumbled stones and unremembered words; it was where the dead were buried now, his grandparents and his great-grandparents among them. The train juddered to a halt with the grinding of steel on steel and a long, weary hiss of steam.
In front of the wooden station buildings, a tall, bearded man in his sixties stood on the platform. Next to him, tense with anticipation, his eyes fixed on the train, was a boy of four. The old man had Stefan Gillespie’s dark eyes and so had the boy. David Gillespie and his grandson Tom waited, and then Tom ran forward as a carriage door opened and his father got out. Stefan folded his son into his arms and lifted him up, laughing, for no reason other than that Tom was laughing, with the simple happiness of seeing him.
‘Jesus, you’re a weight, Tom Gillespie! What’s Oma feeding you?’
‘Will you carry me then?’
>
‘I will not!’ But he carried him a little way along the platform anyway, till they reached David. Inevitably Stefan’s father was looking quizzically at his face and the evidence of the beating. ‘And I’d a run in with a feller before you say anything else about it. It’s nothing but bruises so.’
‘Did you lock him up, Daddy?’ asked Tom, impressed.
‘Well, not exactly. It was sorted out.’ He laughed. His father just nodded, suspecting there was more to it than nothing but bruises, but he asked no questions. It was clear Stefan wouldn’t be saying any more.
‘Tom was at Mass with the Lawlors. He wanted to stay and walk back with you. And I fancied a bit of a walk myself. We had nothing better to do, did we, Tom?’ It was a two-mile walk from the farm on the saddle of land behind Baltinglass Hill and another two back up again.
Tom took his father’s hand as they walked to the road.
‘Is the trike in the window at Clery’s still, the way you told me?’
‘When did I tell you that?’
‘You told me last week, and the week before.’
‘And the week before, ever since you saw the picture in the paper.’
‘Is it there though?’
‘I’d say it is.’
‘Do you look every day?’
‘I maybe miss the odd one.’
The town began just beyond the station. The buildings closed in on either side of the road and shut out the fields along the River Slaney; the blank, stone walls of the mill on one side and low two-storey houses and shops on the other. As they crossed over the bridge the water from the mill race made the river noisier and more urgent, though as it spilled out on the other side it resumed its leisurely course. Again the hill rose up, this time over the wide main street. Here some of the buildings were higher; the bank, the solicitor’s. There were occasional splashes of colour on the rendered fronts of the small-windowed shops and houses, but mostly they were grey, and mostly the grey plaster was crumbling. In the square, next to the statue of Sam MacAllister, who had died in the hills beyond the town in the last days of the rebellion of 1798, was a Christmas tree, yet to be decorated. Beyond the square was the Catholic church. It marked the eastern end of the town as the abbey ruins did the western. But the business of the churches was done for this Sunday. As grandfather, father and son walked through Baltinglass a Sunday silence hung over it. The shops were shut. And for those who were not at home, the pubs – as was their way – were curtained and shuttered, looking in on themselves, and not out on the world.
They were soon through the town and among the fields again, walking away from the river now and beginning the climb to Kilranelagh Hill and the farm that had belonged to Stefan’s grandfather; where his own father had been born, and where David had returned when the Dublin Metropolitan Police had become, inescapably, part of a war that he wanted no part in. They talked about the sow that had farrowed last week and the six new piglets in the sty, and the geese being fattened for the Christmas market, and the one they’d picked out, the fattest one of all, that they’d eat themselves. They talked about the calf that was ill with scour that Tom had prayed wouldn’t die – it was better now and out in the orchard field with its mother, though she still hadn’t the milk for it and Tom was giving the calf the bottle himself. There was the window that Tom didn’t want to talk about at all, that he and Harry Lawlor had smashed, knocking tin cans over with Harry’s catapult. There was the book Opa was reading him now, about Eeyore and Piglet and Winnie the Pooh, and there was the rhyme he could sing from it to a tune Oma had made up on the piano. They always used the German words for grandmother and grandfather; the other grandparents, Maeve’s mother and father, were Grandma and Grandpa, but Stefan’s mother and father were always Oma and Opa, just as his mother’s parents had been to him. They talked about the speckled hen Oma was cooking for the dinner, the one Opa had to kill after Tess the sheepdog chased it into the hay barn and it broke its leg. And they talked for the fourth time and the fifth time about the tricycle in the window of Clery’s department store in O’Connell Street, with a trunk behind you could put things in, that Tom had seen the picture of in the newspaper. He’d cut the picture out and put it by his bed, next to the photograph of his mother and father and his collection of books and stones and tin soldiers. It had been on three lists he’d sent up the chimney, despite warnings that it wasn’t a good idea to overdo it with Santy.
There was a steep track into the farmyard from the road up to Kilranelagh Hill. There was the smell of dung and hay. A long stone barn stretched towards the house on one side of the yard. They heard the sound of the cows inside, calling for food. On the other side of the yard stood a rusty, corrugated shed, full of straw. Quite suddenly, something black and white hurtled through the barn door, barking and snarling furiously. Tess stopped at Stefan’s feet. She looked up at him and abruptly turned away, trotting back into the barn with just one backward glance to tell him that her job, a quite unnecessary job as it happened, had been done. Then as Tom opened the door to the kitchen there was the smell of the dinner. Stefan walked across the room and put his arms round his mother. Tom held up the paper bag his father had brought and took out the loaf of bread that was in it.
‘We’ve got some bread for you, Oma, some special bread!’
Helena stared at her son’s battered face. He put his finger to his lips.
‘It’s from Weinrouk’s. Do you remember it? I’m sure it’s still Mr Moiselle who makes it. Remember? When did you last have a loaf like that, Ma?’ She smiled. She remembered very well. She had more to say, about the bruises, but that would have to wait. She looked back down at the pots on the stove. She spoke quietly, not wanting to let her concern show to Tom.
‘Father Carey’s here. He’s been waiting.’
The sitting room was dark. It looked out on to the farmyard through a window that let little enough light in on a summer’s day. Now the clouds were black over the farm and over Kilranelagh Hill above. It wasn’t a small room, but it was lined with bookshelves that crowded the heavy furniture into the centre. The priest was by the fireplace, crouching down, almost on his knees, pulling out a book. He rose as Stefan Gillespie entered the room.
‘You wanted to see me.’
Normally the word ‘Father’ would have been added to this, and in a man he liked Stefan would have had no problem with that polite expression of respect, even though Anthony Carey was barely two years older. But there was neither liking nor respect, and the feeling was thoroughly reciprocated in the cold and cautious eye the priest cast in his direction.
‘It’s about the boy.’ No name, just the boy.
‘You’d better sit down.’
The priest made no attempt to sit down. Instead he walked to a table at one side of the room where he had made a neat pile of the books he had already taken from the shelves. He put the one he was holding on top of the pile. Then he noticed the bruises on Stefan’s face. He gave a sour grin.
‘A rough night, Sergeant?’
‘A rough customer. I do meet them in my job.’ The reply was curt. He had no intention of explaining himself. He waited for the priest to continue.
‘It’s about his schooling,’ said Father Carey, businesslike now. He had a thin, angular body and somehow his voice had the same spiky quality.
‘We’ve already talked about that,’ replied Stefan shortly.
‘I felt he should begin school at St Tegan’s this September, you remember I’m sure. You weren’t happy about that at the time of course.’
‘I didn’t think he was ready. He’d have been the youngest one starting. He’s still only four. He’ll go next year. I don’t see there’s a hurry.’
‘The particular circumstances –’
‘I thought this was settled. I spoke to Father MacGuire –’
‘I was away then.’ Father Carey smiled.
The smile expressed what both men knew – that Stefan had chosen to speak to the parish priest when the curate was awa
y, precisely because he was. Father MacGuire was an older, gentler, easier man altogether.
‘I have now taken over from Father MacGuire as chairman of the school’s board of management. It’s a lot of work for the parish priest. We both felt that I would have more time and energy to devote to it.’
‘The school year’s begun now anyway. There’s a term gone.’
‘My feeling – my strong feeling – is that Tom should be at school.’
‘Next year he will be.’
‘As I’ve said, the particular circumstances really do argue against that, Sergeant Gillespie, as far as the Church is concerned. He is a Catholic living in a home that is not Catholic. I have a responsibility to ensure that he does not suffer in a situation that is, from the Church’s point of view, extremely unsatisfactory. The lack of a Catholic home makes his presence in a Catholic school all the more imperative. He should start after Christmas.’
The City of Shadows Page 9
