Snow

by John Banville

  Abruptly he stood up.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go and talk to the sister,’ he said. ‘She lives in Scallanstown, in the presbytery – any idea where Scallanstown is?’

  ‘It’s up the road, about ten miles – I passed through it on the way here. You must have, too. There’s not much to it, but you can’t miss the church – ugly big barn of a thing.’

  Strafford stood thinking.

  ‘I wonder if I should telephone her,’ Strafford murmured. ‘I should let her know I’m coming. Somebody told me her name – Rose, is it?’

  ‘Rosemary,’ Jenkins said. He took up the newspaper, showed it. ‘There, look. “Survived by his sister, Rosemary”.’

  ‘Right,’ Strafford said, nodding. ‘Rosemary.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘I’ll go with you. I’ll drive you up and we can both talk to her.’

  ‘What? No, no. You go over to the house, have a look round again. Talk to anyone who’s there.’

  ‘Talk to them about what, in particular?’

  ‘Just – talk. Be polite, be friendly, even. Don’t press, just listen. The more you let them talk, the more likely they’ll give something away. They can’t all be innocent.’ He turned to go, then turned back. ‘By the way, was the whiskey glass found, the one the priest had in his room?’

  ‘No. Nor the light bulb. Someone knows where they are.’

  ‘Yes, and isn’t saying.’

  He sat down again at the table and rolled a crumb of bread into a ball. ‘I thought this was going to be an easy one,’ he said. He sat for some moments, frowning, then stood up a second time, and a second time stopped. ‘I knew there was something I meant to say. Mrs Osborne’s brother is staying here. Harbison, Freddie Harbison. He was here last night, and also the night before, though for some reason he didn’t tell me that. Have a word with him, before you go over to the house.’

  ‘Did he know the priest?’

  ‘He knows his horse,’ Strafford said.

  He went into the bar. It was empty, the stove was cold. He put on his trench coat, his hat, his scarf. Everything felt unreal. Priests didn’t get murdered, it simply didn’t happen. And yet it had.

  There was a pair of galoshes under the hat stand, probably Harbison’s, Strafford guessed. He considered borrowing them, but thought better of it. He would not put his feet where that man’s feet had been. He stood in the glare of snow-light coming in at the low windows, each one with its four small square panes. He looked about. He had the sense of something important left undone, though he couldn’t think what. Later, he would think it had been a premonition. He should have taken up Jenkins’s offer to come with him to Scallanstown.

  He went out into the cold, moist morning. He thought of the Christmas hymn, ‘Good King Wenceslas’. When he was young, he always misheard it as

  Good King Wences last looked out

  On the fist of Stephen,

  When the snow lay round about

  Deep on Crispin’s even and didn’t care that it made no sense. Most things made no sense, when he was young. Yes, he would think later, yes, he should have kept Jenkins with him. He should have kept him safe.

  ‘Sire, the night is darker now

  And the wind blows stronger;

  Fails my heart, I know not how,

  I can go no longer.’

  That bit he had got right.

  16

  The sky was loaded with a swag of mauve-tinted clouds, and the air was the colour of tarnished pewter. It wasn’t snowing, but there had been the fresh fall in the night that Jenkins had mentioned. The land all round was smooth and plump as a pillow. The gnarled bare boughs looked as if they had been blackened in fire. Strafford watched his breath smoke in the air. Summer was unimaginable.

  There was a thick layer of opaque ice on the windscreen of his car, etched with rune-like scratches and squiggles. He had to go back inside and fetch a kettle of warm water from Mrs Reck to melt it with. It took six groan-inducing turns of the crank handle to get the engine shuddering to life. A ragged jet of black smoke billowed from its exhaust pipe at the back end. When he released the clutch the tyres skidded, sending up showers of slush and frozen mud.

  He had gone a good mile along the road before it came to him that he had forgotten to telephone ahead to Scallanstown to let the priest’s sister know he was on his way.

  The short journey took far longer than expected, for he had to drive most of the way in low gear. A few vehicles had been out before him, leaving ruts in the road that gleamed like black glass.

  Scallanstown squatted in a hollow between two low hills. Driving along the main street, he counted five pubs, three grocery shops, two hardware stores. There were also a pork butcher’s – Hafner’s: surely a relative of Ballyglass’s doctor – a barber’s, a newsagent’s and post office combined, and Bernie’s Beauty Parlour. The streets were empty. The only vehicle to be seen was a milkman’s cart, abandoned by the milkman. A mongrel dog was worrying at a soiled scrap of greaseproof paper in the gutter outside Hafner’s.

  The church stood on a rise overlooking the town from its northern end. It was an imposing granite edifice of a peculiarly unpleasant shade of reddish-brown. There were black railings, a broad, arched doorway, and a short stump of spire absurdly out of proportion with the massive structure it was attached to. On the right there was a graveyard, each headstone sporting a neat topping of snow, incongruously reminiscent of slabs of ice cream. On the other side, and standing at a slightly lower level, was the presbytery, a substantial, many-chimneyed house built of the same plum-coloured stone as the church.

  A mourning wreath of black crape was attached to the front door knocker. It reminded Strafford of a gentleman gunslinger’s elaborate neckwear in some movie he had seen long ago.

  Rosemary Lawless was a tall, lean woman, handsome in a somewhat forbidding way. She had a thin pale mouth and prominent, dull-grey eyes. She wore a black skirt and a black jumper and a black woollen cardigan. She was in her early thirties. He had expected her to be older, he didn’t know why. She had a taut, parched look that Strafford recognised, the look of a person caught in the furnace-glare of grief.

  He introduced himself. They didn’t shake hands – it would have seemed in some way inappropriate. Death makes everything difficult.

  ‘Forgive me for bothering you, at such a time,’ he said, picturing the words in print, as in the pages of an etiquette book.

  Rosemary Lawless moved aside in the doorway and gestured to him to enter. The black-and-white tiled hallway was chilly. The house, beyond, was a zone of silence. On a bog-oak table, shiny as hewn coal, stood a vase of dried chrysanthemums that must have been crimson once but were faded now to palest pink. Everything here had a faded look.

  ‘I thought it would be Sergeant Radford who would come,’ the woman said, unable to suppress a note of peevishness.

  ‘He’s unwell,’ Strafford said. ‘The ’flu, apparently.’

  ‘The ’flu. I see. So that’s what they’re calling it now. You know he’s a drunkard.’

  ‘I’m told he lost a son.’

  Something closed in her expression, like a door shutting.

  ‘I haven’t lit the fire in the parlour yet,’ she said. ‘But the stove is going in the kitchen. I’ll make tea.’

  She went ahead of him along the hall, then through a narrower corridor where the tiles gave way to linoleum. The air in the kitchen was stiflingly hot; Strafford felt an immediate constriction in his chest. There was a dresser with cups and plates, a table of scrubbed deal, four stiff-backed chairs and, beside the iron stove, a rocker, across the back of which was draped a tartan rug.

  Rosemary Lawless pulled a chair out from the table for Strafford, and a second one for herself. For a moment, in the silence, there was a sense of helpless teetering. Strafford could think of nothing to say.

  The rocking chair, facing the stove, was a presence of its own in the room.

  Rosemary Lawless had fixed her gaze on Strafford in poi
sed expectancy.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, and winced again, at another hackneyed phrase.

  ‘Thank you,’ the woman responded, and looked at her hands, folded lifelessly before her on the table. ‘I hope you’ve come to tell me the truth about what happened to my brother.’

  Strafford glanced at the rocking chair.

  ‘May I ask, how did you hear of his death?’

  ‘Someone telephoned, I can’t remember who. Someone from the Guards’ barracks in the town, I think. Not Sergeant Radford.’

  ‘Probably the Guard on desk duty. What did he—?’

  ‘Just that there had been an accident at Ballyglass, and that my brother was dead. Then there was a story in the paper this morning’ – she put a hand to her forehead – ‘it said he had fallen downstairs and died. They said it happened in Ballyglass. I suppose that means he was at the House.’

  ‘Yes. He stayed the night there.’

  ‘Oh, of course he did,’ she exclaimed, her tight lips tightening further and turning a shade whiter. ‘He couldn’t keep away from them, his grand friends.’

  ‘So he was there quite a lot?’

  ‘Too much, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Why is that? Do you dislike the Osbornes? Did you disapprove of the family?’

  She shrugged dismissively.

  ‘It’s not for me to disapprove of them or not. They aren’t our kind, and we’re not theirs. Tom wouldn’t listen to me, oh, no. He wanted to be like them, with his horse riding and fox hunting and all the rest of it.’ She stopped, and frowned. ‘I’m sorry. I offered you tea, then I forgot.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I don’t need anything.’

  ‘I can’t get myself organised. My brain is spinning, round and round. I feel nothing will ever be right again. I suppose that will pass. They say it does.’ She gave a low, bitter laugh. ‘Time is a great healer, that’s what they say, don’t they? They’re all so wise.’

  She tugged at a loose thread in the sleeve of her cardigan. To Strafford it seemed as if she were made of fine spun glass, tinted grey and black, that might shatter at any moment under its own internal pressure.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s gone,’ she said, and she too turned her eyes to the rocking chair. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She paused, and again she laughed. ‘Of course, that’s what everyone says too, isn’t it.’

  Strafford looked away. Other people’s pain embarrassed him. He wished, as so often, that he was a smoker, for at least then he’d have something to do with his hands. Maybe he should take up the pipe. He wouldn’t even have to light it, he could just fiddle with it, as pipe smokers do. Anything can make a mask.

  ‘Will you tell me about him, about your brother?’ he asked. ‘Or tell me about your family, at least – have you other siblings?’

  She shook her head. ‘There was only the two of us. Thomas was the eldest.’

  ‘Did you always keep house for him? – I mean, after he became a priest?’

  ‘Yes. Except when he was over in the west for a couple of years, as chaplain at a place there for orphans.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Where was that?’

  ‘Carricklea, it’s called. It’s an industrial school.’

  Carricklea. He knew about Carricklea. And he had heard it mentioned recently – by whom?

  ‘What did you do, then,’ he asked, ‘when he was away, in the west?’

  She stared at him, baffled. ‘What did I do? I did nothing. I took care of my father. He was dying.’

  ‘He must have been young, your father, when he died?’

  ‘Yes, he was only in his fifties.’

  He nodded. It was the old story, the son sent off in glory to the priesthood, while the daughter stayed at home to tend the parents until they were gone and she was left alone, young still but old already, untrained for anything other than spinsterhood.

  He thought of his own father. What would happen when he became too old to look after himself – who would care for him then?

  ‘I wanted to be a teacher,’ Rosemary Lawless said, ‘but it was unheard of in the family, a daughter going to the university. Tom, our Tommy, got everything.’ There was no rancour in her words. That was the natural order, that the son would be the favoured one. That was how it always had been, and how it was.

  ‘Are you acquainted with the Osbornes?’ he asked. ‘Do you know them?’

  She stared at him. ‘Do you think they’d have anything to do with me? I can’t even ride a horse.’ She drew herself back on the chair and cast about the room with a look of desperation. ‘It’s so stuffy in here,’ she said, with a sort of gasp. ‘Do you mind if we go out? I usually go for a walk at this time of the morning. I know the weather is terrible.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s not snowing now.’

  She looked down past the table at his shoes. ‘Would you wear a pair of his boots? They’d probably fit you.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said again, too hastily, as he realised too late. Try as he might, he did not have it in him to care enough for her distress. Yet what of it? No one cared enough, not really, for all the kind words and the mournful smiles they lavished upon the bereaved. The living live, the dead are dead. He almost heard his father’s soft, heartless chuckle.

  In the silence he studied the woman before him, as she sat with downcast eyes, her hands folded on the table. So much anger, so much resentment, so much loss. What if she had come by a key to Ballyglass House, and had gone there last night, by some means or other – he had seen no sign here of a car – and had let herself in by the front door and gone upstairs and unscrewed the bulb from the passageway and hidden herself in the darkness to await her moment?

  Our Tom got everything.

  But no, he told himself, no. She might have killed him, in a fever of fury – it was possible, he knew it – but she would not have mutilated him in that way. For such violence, another level of rage would have been called for, another extreme of vengefulness. But all the same—? He looked about him. What things might have gone on in this house, between a brother and a sister?

  The woman stood up from the table.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘will we go?’

  In the hall she produced a pair of high-sided walking boots – ‘Tom brought them back from a holiday in Italy’ – and he tried them on.

  ‘Are they too big?’

  ‘They are a little on the roomy side, yes.’

  She went upstairs, and presently came back, bringing with her two pairs of men’s thick socks. He put on both pairs. As he did so, an image flashed into his mind of the priest lying on the floor at Ballyglass House, his hands folded on his chest and his eyes open, and he felt a momentary flutter of revulsion. He would be wearing not only a dead man’s boots, but a dead man’s socks as well. No end to life’s grotesqueries.

  They walked together along a path traversing the hillside where the house stood. She said it was a pity about the mist – the landscape looked like a smudged pencil drawing. ‘When it’s clear there’s a nice view along the Slaney Valley towards Enniscorthy.’

  The snow was patchy here on the lee side of the hill, and scraps of sheep’s wool were snagged in the bare heather.

  Rosemary Lawless wore a heavy black overcoat and a wool hat with a bobble. Strafford tightened the knot of his scarf at his throat. He thought wistfully of last night’s hot-water bottle. He thought of Peggy the barmaid, too, of her red hair and her freckles, and of her eyes as green as – as whatever is greenest green, eyes that had, in their moment, quite eclipsed the memory of Sylvia Osborne’s grey and melancholy gaze.

  Look at you, he told himself, daydreaming about a girl in a country pub. Was he not the son of a stern and dutiful people? What would his Strafford forebears, who had fought and slaughtered for Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford, what would they think of him, mooning like this after a girl? Sometimes it came to him that he was lonelier than he knew.

  ‘Will you tell me about your brothe
r?’ he prompted for the second time.

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she snapped impatiently.

  ‘Well, from all accounts he was a very popular cleric, not only in the parish, but in the county, and beyond.’

  She looked off into the mist. ‘He should never have gone to be a priest,’ she said bitterly. ‘He was wasted on it. He could have been anything, he could have done anything.’ She gave a sour little laugh. ‘“It was God calling him,” they’ll tell you. If so, why didn’t he call me? I could have been a nun, it would have suited me, better than it suited Tom to be a priest.’ They came to a stop at a rocky ledge. ‘You know who we are, don’t you,’ the woman asked, turning to him, ‘the Lawlesses? My father was John Joe Lawless – JJ, as everyone called him.’

  ‘Ah. No, I didn’t know that.’

  JJ Lawless had been a notorious figure in the Civil War, one of the IRA leader Michael Collins’s most unwavering supporters and a ruthless director of the Big Fellow’s death squads. JJ had been sentenced to be hanged, but was reprieved on the direct intervention of the British prime minister, who had seen his potential in the Treaty negotiations that were about to take place. Later, when the Civil War ended, Mr John Joseph Lawless became a barrister and set up his own firm, specialising in the defence of unreconciled IRA men who had been marked for the scaffold by order of the Free State government. When peace came, or what was called peace, JJ Lawless & Son was the leading law firm in the province of Leinster, until JJ’s premature death ten years before. So, Strafford thought, those Lawlesses.

  ‘That would have been a weighty inheritance, for a son,’ he said, minding his words. ‘For a daughter too, of course.’

  This last she ignored.

  ‘It was why Tom went for the priesthood,’ she said, with an odd vehemence, ‘I’ve no doubt of that. It was his only way out. There was no competing with Daddy. Tom had to make his own way, and his own name. Daddy never forgave him when he announced to the family that he had a vocation – oh, the fights they had! – but Tom held out and made his escape.’