‘Dried out a lovely shade,’ Mr Schele says. ‘The bathroom.’
‘There’s half that tin left for touching up.’ The coffee cup is warm in Sidney’s cold hands. He likes that skirt. He’d like to see it folded on a chair and Vera standing in her slip, her jersey still on. The jersey’s buttons are at the top, along one shoulder, four red buttons to match the wool. In the photograph it was a jacket, and white dots on her shirt. A loving sister, the paper said.
‘Anything on the News, Sidney?’
He shakes his head, unable to answer the question because this morning he didn’t turn the radio on. Some expedition reached a mountain top, Vera says.
‘Bad night in the club,’ Sidney says, and tells them. He’d had to fish light bulbs and tins out of the toilet when he was closing up, but he doesn’t mention that. The girl who’d collapsed was on Ecstasy, the ambulance men said. There is some way they can tell an Ecstasy collapse, now that they’ve got used to them. Sidney doesn’t know what it is.
‘Out of control,’ Mr Schele comments, hearing that. ‘The whole globe out of control.’
‘Maybe how they sweat. There’s different ways a person sweats, an ambulance man told me. According to what’s taken.’
The blow left scarcely a contusion. It was to the neck, the paper said, the side of the neck, no more than a smack. The intruder had lost his head; he’d walked into a room where he wasn’t expecting anyone to be, and there was a figure in a wheelchair. He’d have been seen at once, but what he didn’t know was that he couldn’t ever have been described. Probably he struck the blow to frighten; probably he said if a description was given he’d be back. The room is empty now, even the bed taken away; two years ago Sidney painted out the flowery wallpaper with satin emulsion - Pale Sherbet – the woodwork to match in gloss.
‘One thing I hate,’ he says, ‘is when an ambulance has to come.’
God did not make another man in all His world as gentle: often Vera thinks that, and she thinks it now. His voice was gentle when he said about an ambulance coming to take away the Ecstasy girl, the hands that grasp the coffee cup are gentle. ‘Short of a slate or two,’ they said when they told her a man had come forward. ‘But crystal clear in his statements.’
The first time she saw him in court his shabby jacket needed a stitch. Yes, what he said was true, she agreed when it was put to her, and was told to speak up.
‘You see the world at that club, Sidney,’ her father says.
When she walked free, when she came back to the house, her father didn’t look at her at first. And when he did she could see him thinking that a man who was a stranger to her, whose face she had not even noticed, had reached out to her in the darkness of a cinema, and that she had acquiesced. With her looks, she could have had anyone: that, too, her father didn’t say.
‘Yeah, a lot come into the club. Though Monday’s always light. Not much doing on a Monday.’
She knew he’d visit. She knew in court, something about him, something about the pity that was in his eyes. Nearly a year went by but still she guessed she’d open the porch door and there he’d be, and then he was. He came when he knew her father would be out at work. He stood there tongue-tied and she said come in. ‘I couldn’t face him,’ her father said when she told him, but in the end he did, so much was owing; and now he waits for a proposal. Step by step, time wore away the prejudice any father would have.
‘You try that new biscuit, Sidney.’ She pushes the plate towards him and then fills up his coffee cup. Nicer than the ones with the peel in them, she says.
‘I met that woman with the dog again. Last night.’
They don’t know who the woman is. Must be she lives the other side of the green, her father has said when she was mentioned before. On his own walks he has never run into her, preferring to go the other way.
‘You think we put in another rose, Sidney?’ her father asks.
‘It’s empty, the way it is. You’d notice that.’
‘I thought it maybe would be.’
Mr Schele goes to see for himself, changing his shoes in the shed by the back door. The first time he faced Sidney he kept looking at his hands, unable to keep his eyes off them. He kept thinking of Vera when she was little, when her mother was alive, Mona already confined. Vera always looked out for him, and ran down the garden path to meet him when he came home, and he lifted her up high, making her laugh, the way poor Mona never could, not all her life. The first time he faced Sidney he had to go out and get some air, had stood where he is standing now, near to where the rosebush was. It wasn’t wrong that Vera had left Mona on her own that afternoon. Ever since their mother died he’d kept saying to Vera that she couldn’t be a prisoner in the house. One sister should not imprison another, no matter what the circumstances were; that was not ever meant. The shopping had to be done; and no one could begrudge an hour or so in a cinema. And yet, he thought the first day he faced Sidney, why did it have to be the way it was, poor Mona’s head fallen sideways as though her neck’d been cracked, while that was happening in the cinema’s dark?
‘I’m sorry there was that trouble,’ Vera says in the kitchen, referring to the fight in the club, and the girl for whom an ambulance had come.
‘On a Saturday you expect it.’ And Sidney says he doesn’t know why that is. Often on a Thursday or a Friday the club’s as full. ‘I like a Sunday,’ he says, quite suddenly, as if he has for the first time realized that. ‘There’s church bells somewhere near the club. Well, anyway they carry. Could be a mile off.’
On Sunday evenings Vera goes to church, a Baptist place, but anywhere would do. She says she’s sorry when she kneels, and feels the better for saying it in a church, with other people there. And afterwards she wonders what they’d think if they knew, their faces still credulous following their hour of comfort. She makes herself go through it when she’s on her knees, not permitting the excuses. She wants to draw attention to how awful it was for so long, ever since their mother died, how awful it would always be, the two of them left together, the washing, the dressing, the lifting from the wheelchair, the feeding, the silent gaze. All that, when praying, Vera resists in her thoughts. ‘You want to get turned off?’ a boy said once, she heard him in the play yard when she was fourteen. ‘You take a look at the sister.’ And later, when the wheelchair was still pushed out and about, proposals didn’t come. Later still, when there were tears and protestations on the street, the wheelchair was abandoned, not even pushed into the garden, since that caused distress also: Mona was put upstairs. ‘Vera, take your friend up,’ her father, not realizing, suggested once: an afflicted sister’s due to stare at visitors to the house. On her knees – kneeling properly, not just bent forward – Vera makes herself watch the shadow that is herself, the sideways motion of her flattened hand, some kind of snap she felt, the head gone sideways too.
‘The wind’s dropped down. You stay to lunch, Sidney? You could have your fire, eh?’
In the courtroom people gazed at both of them. Asked again, she agreed again. ‘Yes, that is so,’ she agreed because a man she didn’t know wanted her to say it: that for as long as the film lasted they were lovers.
‘I’ll have the fire,’ he says, and when he moves from the window she sees her father, standing by the empty place where the rosebush was. His belief protects them, gives them their parts, restricts to silence all that there is. When her father goes to his grave, will his ghost come back to tell her his death’s the punishment for a bargain struck?
‘A loin of lamb,’ Vera says, and takes it from the fridge, a net of suet tied in place to make it succulent in the roasting. Parsnips she’ll roast too, and potatoes because there’s nothing Sidney likes more.
‘I left my matches at the club.’
She takes a box from a cupboard, swinging back the door that’s on a level with her head, reaching in. Cook’s Matches the label says. She hands them to him, their fingers do not touch. In the garden her father has not moved, still standing where
his rosebush was. He’s frail, he suffers from the ailments of the elderly. More often than he used to he speaks of borrowed time.
‘I’ll get it going now,’ Sidney says.
There’ll be a funeral, hardly different from her mother’s, not like Mona’s. Their time is borrowed too, the punishment more terrible because they know it’s there: no need for a ghost to spell it out.
She smears oil on the parsnips she has sliced, and coats with flour the potatoes she has already washed and dried. Sidney likes roast potatoes crispy. There is nothing, Vera sometimes thinks, she doesn’t know about his likes and dislikes. He’ll stand there at the funeral and so will she, other people separating them. The truth restored, but no one else knowing it.
‘Colder now,’ her father says when he comes in. The wind turned, and left a chill behind when it dropped.
He warms himself by standing close to the gas stove, massaging his fingers. Without his presence, there would be no reason to play those parts; no reason to lose themselves in deception. The darkness of their secrets lit, the love that came for both of them through their pitying of each other: all that might fill the empty upstairs room, and every corner of the house. But Vera knows that, without her father, they would frighten one another.
Of the Cloth
He was out of touch, and often felt it: out of touch with the times and what was happening in them, out of touch with two generations of change, with his own country and what it had become. If he travelled outside Ireland, which he had never done, he knew he would find the same new mores everywhere, the different, preferred restrictions by which people now lived their lives; but it was Ireland he thought about, the husk of the old, the seed of the new. And often he wondered what that new would be.
The Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice, Ennismolach Rectory, his letters were addressed, the nearest town and the county following. His three Church of Ireland parishes, amalgamated over the years, were in a valley of pasture land in the mountains, three small churches marking them, one of them now unattended, each of them remote, as his rectory was, as his life was.
The town that was nearest was thirteen miles away, where the mountain slope became a plain and the river that flowed through the townland of Ennismolach was bridged. The rectory was reached from Doonan crossroads by taking the road to Corlough Gap and turning right three miles farther on at the Shell petrol pump. A few minutes later there was the big Catholic Church of the Holy Assumption, solitary and splendid by the roadside, still seeming new although it had been there for sixty years. Over the brow of the next hill were the gates to Ennismolach Rectory, its long curving avenue years ago returned to grass.
This was granite country and Grattan Fitzmaurice had a look of that grey, unyielding stone, visible even in the pasture land of the valley. Thin, and tall, he belonged to this landscape, had come from it and had chosen to return to it. Celibacy he had chosen also. Families had spread themselves in the vast rectory once upon a time; now there was only the echo of his own footsteps, the latch of the back door when Mrs Bradshaw came in the mornings, the yawning of his retriever, the wireless when he turned it on. Emptily, all sound came twice because an echo added a pretence of more activity than there was, as if in mercy offering companionship.
There was, as well, the company of the past: the family Grattan remembered here was his own, his father the rector of Ennismolach before him, his mother wallpapering the rooms and staining the floorboards to freshen them up, his sisters. The rectory had always been home, a vigour there in his childhood, the expectation that it would continue. Change had come before his birth, and the family was still close to revolution and civil war. The once impregnable estates had fallen back to the clay, their people gone away, burnt-out houses their memorial stones. Rectories escaped because in Ireland men of the cloth would always have a place: as the infant nation was nurtured through the 1930s, it seemed in Ennismolach that ends would forever be made to meet in the lofty rooms, that there would forever be chilblains in winter, cheap cuts from the butcher at Fenit Bridge, the Saturday silence while a sermon was composed. And even as a child Grattan had wanted to follow his father’s footsteps in this parish.
His father died in 1957, his mother in that year also. By then the congregation at Ennismolach church had dwindled, the chapel of ease near Fenit Bridge hadn’t been made use of for years, and melancholy characterized other far-flung parishes in the county. The big houses, which had supported them, tumbled further into ruin; the families who had fled did not return; and from farm and fields, from townlands everywhere, emigration took a toll. ‘It’ll get worse,’ Grattan’s father said a few weeks before he died. ‘You realize it’ll get worse?’ It wasn’t unexpected, he said, that the upheaval should bring further, quieter upheaval. The designation of the Protestant foundation he served, the ‘Church of Ireland’, had long ago begun to seem too imposing a title, ludicrous almost in its claim. ‘We are a remnant,’ Grattan’s father said.
It was an irony that they should be, for their Protestant people of the past – Wolfe Tone and Thomas Davis, Emmet and Parnell, the Henry Grattan after whom Grattan was named – had in their different ways and in their different times been the inspiration for the Ireland that had come about, and Grattan knew that its birth was Ireland’s due no matter how, in the end, it had happened. Yet it was true: they were a remnant. While Church of Ireland notice-boards still stood by old church gates, gold letters on black giving details of what services could be offered, there was a withering within that Church that seemed a natural thing. Risen from near suppression, the great Church of Rome inherited all Ireland.
In a dream when he was old, Grattan rode on horseback from Ennismolach Rectory, and walked slowly to an altar between crowded pews. The dream came often and he knew it did so because the past was never far from his thoughts. He knew, as well, that the pages could not be turned back, that when the past had been the present it had been uneasy with shortcomings and disappointments, injustice and distress. He did not in any way resent the fact that, while his own small churches fell into disrepair, the wayside Church of the Holy Assumption, with its Virgin’s grotto and its slope of new graves, was alive and bustling, that long lines of cars were parked on the verges and in gateways for its Sunday Masses, that there was Father MacPartlan as well as Father Leahy, that large sums were gathered for missions to the African heathen. Father MacPartlan and Father Leahy praised and rejoiced and celebrated, gave absolution, gave thanks. The simplicity of total belief, of belonging and of being in touch, nourished – or so it seemed to Grattan – Father MacPartlan’s ruddy features and Father Leahy’s untroubled smile.
A man called Con Tonan, who had lost the use of an arm in a tractor accident, worked in the garden of Ennismolach Rectory, his disablement rendering him unfit for employment as a farm labourer, which had always been the source of his livelihood. Unable to pay more than a pittance, Grattan took him on when he’d been out of work for a year. Con Tonan, still young then, knew nothing about gardening, but the six-mile bicycle journey to Ennismolach Rectory, and doing what he could to release the choked shrubs and restore the flowerbeds that had all but disappeared, gave a pattern to his day three times a week. Mrs Bradshaw, one of Grattan’s flock at Glenoe, began to come to the rectory when Con Tonan was just beginning to understand the garden. Twice a week she drove over from Glenoe in a small, old Volkswagen, a woman who was as warm-hearted as she was dutiful.
That was the household at Ennismolach, Mrs Bradshaw ill-paid also, her arrival on Tuesdays and Thursdays as much an act of charity on her part as the employment of a one-armed man was on Grattan’s. Sometimes Con Tonan brought one of his children with him, skilfully balancing the child on the crossbar of his bicycle in spite of the absence of an arm.
For twenty-eight years Con Tonan came to the rectory and then, before one winter began, he decided the journey was too much for him. ‘Arrah, I’m too old for it now,’ was all he said when he broke the news of his intentions. It was perhaps because his pension ha
d come through, Mrs Bradshaw suggested, but Grattan knew it wasn’t. It was because Con Tonan was as old as he was, because he was tired.
Mrs Bradshaw was younger. Plump and respectable, she knew all about the greater world, delighting in its conveniences as much as she deplored its excesses. She and Grattan would sit together at the kitchen table on Tuesdays and Thursdays, exchanging the scraps of news she brought for those he had heard that morning on the radio, which she herself rarely turned on.
He sensed her fondness for him – an old man who was a legend in the neighbourhood simply because he’d been a part of it for so long – and sometimes asked her if it was ever said that he was going on beyond his time. Was it said that he was ineffective in his vocation, that he managed ineffectively what remained of his Church’s influence in the amalgamated parishes? He was always reassured. No one wanted him to go, no one wanted some bright young curate to come out from one of the towns on alternate Sundays, to breathe life into what was hardly there.
‘Mr Fitzmaurice,’ a red-cheeked, red-haired youth said, arriving at the rectory on a day in the early summer of 1997. ‘My father died.’
Grattan recognized the bicycle the boy dismounted from as the big old Rudge that had once so regularly been pedalled up and down the rectory avenue. He hadn’t seen a child of Con Tonan’s for years, since one by one they’d all become too heavy to be carried on their father’s crossbar.
Selected Stories, Volume 2 Page 23
