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.
‘Oh, Seamus, I’m sorry. Come in, come in.’
His one-time gardener had died of a stroke, a mercy he hadn’t lingered: the boy was articulate, slow but clear in delivering the sombre message.
‘He was speechless a day, Mr Fitzmaurice. Then that was the end of it.’ His mother had sent him over, and Grattan was touched that he’d been remembered. The funeral was on Monday.
‘I’ll be there of course, Seamus.’
He made tea and put out biscuits. He asked Seamus if he’d like a boiled egg, but Seamus said no. They talked for a while, until the tea he’d poured was cool and then drunk. Seamus was working for Kelly Bros., who were building two bungalows at Fenit Bridge.
‘Are you all right yourself, Mr Fitzmaurice?’ he enquired before he mounted the bicycle that now was his. It was serving its third generation, having passed on in the same way to his father.
‘Ah, I am, Seamus, I am.’
‘I’ll be off so.’
Mrs Bradshaw brought the same tidings the next morning. A decent, quiet man, she said, which she had not said in Con Tonan’s lifetime. A humble man, who had accepted without bitterness the tragedy that had changed his life. ‘Sure, wasn’t he happy here?’ her comment was, her tone adding one finality to another. She washed their coffee cups at the sink and stacked away the two saucers. She’d brought eggs, she said, the hens beginning to lay again.
On Monday he attended the funeral. He held back afterwards outside the big church that still seemed new, waiting his turn with the widow. He did not know her well; he could remember meeting her only once before, a long time ago.
‘He loved going over to the rectory,’ she said, and as if something in the clergyman’s expression indicated surprise she said it again, her hands grasping one of his. ‘Oh, he did, Mr Fitzmaurice, he did,’ she insisted. ‘It was a good thing in the end, he used say. If he hadn’t had the accident he wouldn’t have got to know Ennismolach Rectory. He wouldn’t have got to know yourself, sir.’
Grattan Fitzmaurice drove away from the funeral, warmed by what had been said to him. Walking with his dog about the garden that had deteriorated in the last few years, although was not as neglected as it had been before he had help in it, he thought about the man who had died, who had become a friend. Con Tonan hadn’t known what a daphne was when first he came, nor what choisya and ceanothus were called. He’d been amazed that raspberry canes were cut down to the ground in the autumn. He’d learnt how to rid the roses of suckers and when to clip the yew hedge, and not to burn the leaves that came down in autumn but to let them decay into mould to enrich the soil. The two men had talked about ordinary things: the weather, and sometimes what a new government intended to do, pondering over which promises would be easy to keep, which would have to be abandoned. In other ways they were separated, but that never mattered.
When Grattan had fed his dog on the evening of the funeral, when he’d boiled himself the couple of eggs he always had at a quarter past seven, with toast and a pot of tea, there was the sound of a car. He opened the front door a few minutes later to the younger of the two priests who had conducted the service. Smiling, hand out, Father Leahy said, ‘I thought I’d come over.’
He said it easily, as if he were in the habit of calling in regularly at the rectory, as if he knew from long experience that this was a good moment. But neither he nor Father MacPartlan had ever driven up to Ennismolach Rectory before.
‘Come in, come in,’ Grattan invited. The curate’s handshake had been firm, the kind you can feel the friendliness in.
‘Isn’t that a lovely evening, Mr Fitzmaurice? Are we in for a heatwave?’
‘I’d say we might be.’
In the big drawing-room all the furniture was old but not old enough to be valuable: armchairs and a sofa shabby from wear, plant stands and rickety little tables with books and ornaments on them, sun-browned wallpaper cluttered with pictures and photographs, a tarnished looking-glass huge above the white marble mantelpiece, a card-table with a typewriter on it. The long curtains – once two shades of blue – were almost colourless now and in need of repair.
‘You’ll take a cup of tea, Father?’
‘Ah no, no. Thanks though, Mr Fitzmaurice.’
‘Well, we’ve lost poor Con.’
‘God rest him.’
‘I missed him when coming out here was too much for him in the end.’
Glancing beside him as he sat down, Grattan noticed the Irish Times, where earlier he had placed it on the table by his armchair. His eye had been caught then, as it was now, by the grinning countenance of Father Brendan Smyth being taken into custody by a grim-faced detective. Paedophile Priest is Extradited, the headline ran. He reached out and turned the newspaper over.
‘You’d miss Con, of course.’ There was a pause, and then Father Leahy added, ‘You’re a long way from the world here.’
‘I’m used to that.’
He wondered if his gesture with the paper had been noticed. He had meant it as a courtesy, but a courtesy could be offensive. Long way from the world or not, it was impossible not to be aware of the Norbertine priest’s twenty-year-long persecution of children in Belfast. One sentence already served in Magilligan Prison in County Derry, he was now on his way to face seventy-four similar charges in Dublin. All day yesterday the News had been full of it.
‘It was good of you to attend the funeral, Mr Fitzmaurice.’
‘I was fond of Con.’
The funeral service had impressed him. There’d been confidence in its ceremony and its ritual, in the solemn voice of Father MacPartlan, in Father Leahy’s, in the responses of the congregation. It was there again in the two priests’ gestures, hands raised to give the blessing, in the long line of communicants and the coffin borne away, the graveside exhortations. Founded on a rock, Grattan had thought: you felt that here. The varnished pews were ugly, the figure in the Stations of the Cross lifeless, but still you felt the confidence and the rock.
‘Mrs Tonan said the same thing, that it was good of you to come. ’Tis difficult sometimes for a parishioner to understand that someone of your Church would want to.’
‘Ah well, of course I would.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
There was a silence. Then Father Leahy said:
‘That’s a great dog.’
‘I’d be lost without Oisín.’
‘You always had a dog. I always associate a dog with you in the car.’
‘Company.’ And Grattan thought you didn’t often see a priest with a dog. Maybe once in a while you would, but not often. He didn’t say so in case it sounded intrusive. He remembered Father Leahy as a child, one of the Leahys from the white farmhouse on the Ballytoom road. Three brothers he remembered, swinging their legs on a whitewashed wall, waving at him whenever he drove past. The priest would be the youngest, the youngest in all the family, someone told him once. Four girls there were as well.
‘We neither of us moved far off,’ he said, and Father Leahy nodded, affirming his understanding of how the conversation had drifted in this direction.
‘We didn’t, right enough,’ he said.
Grattan wondered why the curate had come. Had he decided to pay the visit when he saw the lone figure at the funeral? Had he come to offer half an hour of companionship, maybe out of pity? Had the two priests said after the service that perhaps the occasion had been hard to bear for a Protestant clergyman, with nothing of a flock left?
‘Your family scattered?’ He kept the conversation going, feeling that was required of him.
‘Mostly.’
The farm was still run by the brother who’d inherited it, Young Pat. There was another brother in Cleveland, Ohio. The sisters
had all gone, married in different parts of the country, two in Cork.
‘We used meet up at Christmas, a few of us anyway. They’d come back to the farm, but then the girls have families of their own now. They don’t want to be travelling.’
‘I remember you sitting on that wall.’
‘We used learn off the car numbers. Not that there were many, maybe two a day. ZB 726.’
‘Was that my old Morris?’
‘The slopey-back green Morris. You used put out one of your indicators when you went by, waving at us. D’you remember that? The little orange yoke?’
‘I bought that car from Mr Keane in the Bank of Ireland. Would you have known Mr Keane?’
‘I would, of course. Wasn’t it Keane himself lent my father the price of the milking parlour? A decent man.’
Protestants were often called decent. You knew where you were with Protestants: that was said often in those days. Straight-dealing was what was meant, the quality not begrudged. The bank manager had been the churchwarden at Ennismolach.
‘Father MacPartlan remembers your father. Your mother too.’
Grattan imagined Father MacPartlan mentioning them, telling his curate about the old days, how the big houses had been burnt down, the families driven from them, how the rectories had escaped. ‘Wouldn’t you call round on the old fellow one of these evenings?’ he imagined Father MacPartlan urging. ‘If it wouldn’t be taken wrong?’ And the bluff tones of the older priest continued to disturb Grattan’s thoughts, instructing the curate in mercy and understanding, reminding him of the spirit of the different times. After all, it was said also, all three of them shared the cloth.
‘Would you care for a stroll in the garden, Father?’
‘Well, that would be grand.’
Dusk had settled in. With the dog a few paces behind them, the two men passed from path to path, going slowly, shrubs and flowers pointed out. Father Leahy, like Con Tonan once, knew the names of hardly anything.
‘Con knocked the garden into shape for me.’
‘His wife was saying you taught him the way of it.’
‘Oh, at first of course. He ended knowing more than I did myself. He loved the old garden before he was done with it.’
‘He was a long time here.’
‘He was.’
‘Near enough the time Father MacPartlan entered the priesthood it would have been when he came to you.’
The air was fragrant with the scent of night stock, there was the sound of Oisín rooting in the undergrowth. Rabbits came into the garden, and one scuttled away now.
‘Father MacPartlan came off a farm, like I did myself. A lot of priests in Ireland came off a farm.’
‘They still do, I’m told.’
‘Simple enough lads at first.’
‘Yes.’
It seemed to Grattan that they were talking about something else. Nothing was ever entirely as it seemed, he found himself thinking, and didn’t know why he did.
‘Different for yourself, I’d say, Mr Fitzmaurice.’
Grattan laughed. ‘Oh, I knew what I was in for.’
They stood by the barbed-wire fence at the bottom of the garden, looking out into the shadows of pasture land beyond. Heifers were grazing there, but you could hardly see them now. Shadowy themselves, the two black-clad figures turned and walked back the way they’d come. It didn’t seem likely, a sudden realization came to Grattan, that the priests had spoken in the way he’d thought, that the curate had been instructed in mercy and understanding. When you imagined, you were often wrong, and again he wondered why his visitor was here.
‘It’s a big old house,’ Father Leahy said. ‘It would always have been a rectory, would it?’
‘Oh, it was built as a rectory all right. 1791.’
‘It’ll see a few years yet.’
‘A lot of the clergy would prefer something smaller these days.’
‘But not yourself?’
‘You’re used to a place.’
In front of the house again, twilight giving way to the dark now, they stood by Father Leahy’s car, a silence gathering, the small talk of the conversation running out. Oisín ambled over the gravel and settled himself patiently on the front-door steps. Father Leahy said:
‘I never knew a place as peaceful.’
‘Any time you’re near by come in again, Father.’
There was the flare of a match, then the glow of the priest’s cigarette, tobacco pleasant on the evening air, mingling with the flowers.
‘It wasn’t easy, I dare say.’ Father Leahy’s face was lost in the dark now, only the glow of the cigarette’s tip moving, his voice trailing off.
‘Easy, Father?’
‘I meant for yourself.’
It seemed to Grattan that it was possible to say that in the dark, when it hadn’t been before, that truth could flourish in the dark, that in the dark communication was easier.
‘Time was, a priest in Ireland wouldn’t read the Irish Times. Father MacPartlan remarks on that. But we take it in now.’
‘I thought maybe that picture -’
‘There’s more to it all than what that picture says.’
Something about the quiet tone of voice bewildered Grattan. And there were intimations beneath the tone that startled him. Father Leahy said:
‘It’s where we’ve ended.’
So softly that was spoken, Grattan hardly heard it, and then it was repeated, increasing his bewilderment. Why did it seem he was being told that the confidence the priests possessed was a surface that lingered beyond its day? Why, listening, did he receive that intimation? Why did it seem he was being told there was illusion, somewhere, in the solemn voices, hands raised in blessing, the holy water, the cross made in the air? At Ennismolach, long ago, there had been the traps and the side-cars and the dog-carts lined up along the Sunday verges, as the cars were lined up now outside the Church of the Holy Assumption. The same sense of nourishment there’d been, the safe foundation on a rock that could not shatter. Why did it seem he was being reminded of that past?
‘But surely,’ he began to say, and changed his mind, leaving the two words uselessly on their own. He often read in the paper these days that in the towns Mass was not as well attended as it had been even a few years ago. In the towns marriage was not always bothered with, confession and absolution passed by. A different culture, they called it, in which restraint and prayer were not the way, as once they had been. Crime spread in the different culture, they said, and drugs taken by children, and old women raped, and murder. A plague it was, and it would reach the country too, was reaching it already. The jolly Norbertine man of God grinned from the newspaper photograph in village shops and farmhouse kitchens, on cottage dressers, propped up against milk jugs at mealtimes, and he grinned again on television screens. Would he say that all he ever did was to reach out and gather in his due, that God had made him so? In the different culture Christ’s imitation offered too little.
‘I often think of those monks on the islands,’ Father Leahy said. ‘Any acre they’d spot out on the sea they would row off to to see could they start a community there.’
‘They would.’
‘Cowled against the wind. Or cowled against what’s left behind. Afraid, Father MacPartlan says. When Father MacPartlan comes in to breakfast you can see the rims of his eyes red.’
An image of the older priest was vivid for a moment in Grattan’s recall, his mourning black, the collar cutting into pink flesh, hair that had thinned and gone grey over the years of their acquaintanceship. That this man wept in the night was barely credible.
‘I never left Ireland,’ Father Leahy said. ‘I have never been outside it.’
‘Nor I.’ The silence after that was part of the dark, easily there, not awkward. And Grattan said, ‘I love Ireland.’
They loved it in different ways: unspoken in the dark, that was another intimation. For Grattan there was history’s tale, regrets and sorrows and distress, the voices of unconque
red men, the spirit of women as proud as empresses. For Grattan there were the rivers he knew, the mountains he had never climbed, wild fuchsia by a seashore and the swallows that came back, turf smoke on the air of little towns, the quiet in long glens. The sound, the look, the shape of Ireland, and Ireland’s rain and Ireland’s sunshine, and Ireland’s living and Ireland’s dead: all that.
On Sundays, when Mass was said and had been said again, Father Leahy stood in a crowd watching the men of Kildare and Kerry, of Offaly and Meath, yelling out encouragement, deploring some lack of skill. And afterwards he took his pint as any man might, talking the game through. For Father Leahy there was the memory of the cars going by, his bare feet on the cobbles of the yard, the sacrifice he had made, and his faithful coming to him, the cross emblazoned on a holy robe. Good Catholic Ireland, a golden age.
‘Anywhere you’d be,’ Grattan said, ‘there’s always change. Like day becoming night.’
‘I know. Sure, I know of course.’
Father Leahy’s cigarette dropped on to the ground. There was the sound of his shoe crunching away the spark left in the butt, then his footsteps began on the gravel. A light came on when he opened the car door.
‘You’re not left bereft, you know,’ Grattan said.
‘Father MacPartlan looked over the table tonight after he’d put sugar in his tea. What he said to me was you’d given Con Tonan his life back. Even though Con Tonan wasn’t one of your own.’
‘Ah, no, no, I didn’t do that.’
‘D’you know the way it sometimes is, you want to tell a person a thing?’
The curate’s hand was held out in the little pool of light, and there was the same friendliness in the clasp before he started the car’s engine.
‘Father Leahy called in last night,’ Grattan heard himself reporting to Mrs Bradshaw. ‘The first time a priest ever came to the rectory that I remember.’ And Mrs Bradshaw, astonished, would think about it all morning while she worked, and would probably say before she left that the curate calling in was an expression of the ecumenical spirit they were all on about these days. Something like that.
For a few more minutes Grattan remained outside, a trace of tobacco smoke still in the garden, the distant hum of the curate’s car not quite gone. The future was frightening for Father Leahy, as it had been for the monks who rowed away from Ireland once, out on to their rocks; as it had been for his father on his deathbed. But the monks and his father had escaped, mercy granted them. The golden age of the bishops was vanishing in a drama that was as violent as the burning of the houses and the fleeing of the families, and old priests like Father MacPartlan were made melancholy by their loss and passed their melancholy on.
Selected Stories Page 24