In March 1798 an incident had taken place in Kinsella’s Barn, which at that time had just been a barn. Twelve men and women, accused of harbouring insurgents, had been tied together with ropes at the command of a Sergeant James. They had been led through the village of Boharbawn, the Sergeant’s soldiers on horseback on either side of the procession, the Sergeant himself bringing up the rear. Designed as an act of education, an example to the inhabitants of Boharbawn and the country people around, the twelve had been herded into a barn owned by a farmer called Kinsella and there burned to death. Kinsella, who had played no part either in the harbouring of insurgents or in the execution of the twelve, was afterwards murdered by his own farm labourers.
‘Sergeant James was a Nottingham man,’ Harold said that evening at supper. ‘A soldier of fortune who didn’t care what he did. Did you know he acquired great wealth, Mr Moran?’
‘No, I wasn’t at all aware of that,’ Canon Moran replied.
‘Harold found out about him,’ Deirdre said.
‘He used to boast he was responsible for the death of a thousand Irish people. It was in Boharbawn he reached the thousand. They rewarded him well for that.’
‘Not much is known about Sergeant James locally. Just the legend of Kinsella’s Barn.’
‘No way it’s a legend.’
Deirdre nodded; Canon Moran did not say anything. They were eating cooked ham and salad. On the table there was a cake which Deirdre had bought in McGovern’s in Enniscorthy, and a pot of tea. There were several bunches of grapes from the greenhouse, and a plate of wafer biscuits. Harold was fond of salad cream, Canon Moran had noticed; he had a way of hitting the base of the jar with his hand, causing large dollops to spurt all over his ham. He didn’t place his knife and fork together on the plate when he’d finished, but just left them anyhow. His fingernails were edged with black.
‘You’d feel sick,’ he was saying now, working the salad cream again. ‘You’d stand there looking at that wall and you’d feel a revulsion in your stomach.’
‘What I meant,’ Canon Moran said, ‘is that it has passed into local legend. No one doubts it took place; there’s no question about that. But two centuries have almost passed.’
‘And nothing has changed,’ Harold interjected. ‘The Irish people still share their bondage with the twelve in Kinsella’s Barn.’
‘Round here of course –’
‘It’s not round here that matters, Mr Moran. The struggle’s world-wide; the sickness is everywhere actually.’
Again Deirdre nodded. She was like a zombie, her father thought. She was being used because she was an Irish girl; she was Harold’s Irish connection, and in some almost frightening way she believed herself in love with him. Frances had once said they’d made a mistake with her. She had wondered if Deirdre had perhaps found all the love they’d offered her too much to bear. They were quite old when Deirdre was a child, the last expression of their own love. She was special because of that.
‘At least Kinsella got his chips,’ Harold pursued, his voice relentless. ‘At least that’s something.’
Canon Moran protested. The owner of the barn had been an innocent man, he pointed out. The barn had simply been a convenient one, large enough for the purpose, with heavy stones near it that could be piled up against the door before the conflagration. Kinsella, that day, had been miles away, ditching a field.
‘It’s too long ago to say where he was,’ Harold retorted swiftly. ‘And if he was keeping a low profile in a ditch it would have been by arrangement with the imperial forces.’
When Harold said that, there occurred in Canon Moran’s mind a flash of what appeared to be the simple truth. Harold was an Englishman who had espoused a cause because it was one through which the status quo in his own country might be damaged. Similar such Englishmen, read about in newspapers, stirred in the clergyman’s mind: men from Ealing and Liverpool and Wolverhampton who had changed their names to Irish names, who had even learned the Irish language, in order to ingratiate themselves with the new Irish revolutionaries. Such men dealt out death and chaos, announcing that their conscience insisted on it.
‘Well, we’d better wash the dishes,’ Deirdre said, and Harold rose obediently to help her.
The walk to Kinsella’s Barn had taken place on a Saturday afternoon. The following morning Canon Moran conducted his services in St Michael’s, addressing his small Protestant congregation, twelve at Holy Communion, eighteen at morning service. He had prepared a sermon about repentance, taking as his text St Luke, 15:32:… for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. But at the last moment he changed his mind and spoke instead of the incident in Kinsella’s Barn nearly two centuries ago. He tried to make the point that one horror should not fuel another, that passing time contained its own forgiveness. Deirdre and Harold were naturally not in the church, but they’d been present at breakfast, Harold frying eggs on the kitchen stove, Deirdre pouring tea. He had looked at them and tried to think of them as two young people on holiday. He had tried to tell himself they’d come to the rectory for a rest and for his blessing, that he should be grateful instead of fanciful. It was for his blessing that Emma had brought Thomas to the rectory, that Linda had brought John. Una would bring Carley in November. ‘Now, don’t be silly,’ Frances would have said.
‘The man Kinsella was innocent of everything,’ he heard his voice insisting in his church. ‘He should never have been murdered also.’
Harold would have delighted in the vengeance exacted on an innocent man. Harold wanted to inflict pain, to cause suffering and destruction. The end justified the means for Harold, even if the end was an artificial one, a pettiness grandly dressed up. In his sermon Canon Moran spoke of such matters without mentioning Harold’s name. He spoke of how evil drained people of their humour and compassion, how people pretended even to themselves. It was worse than Frances’s death, he thought as his voice Continued in the church: it was worse that Deirdre should be part of wickedness.
He could tell that his parishioners found his sermon odd, and he didn’t blame them. He was confused, and naturally distressed. In the rectory Deirdre and Harold would be waiting for him. They would all sit down to Sunday lunch while plans for atrocities filled Harold’s mind, while Deirdre loved him.
‘Are you well again, Mrs Davis?’ he inquired at the church door of a woman who suffered from asthma.
‘Not too bad, Canon. Not too bad, thank you.’
He spoke to all the others, inquiring about health, remarking on the beautiful autumn. They were farmers mostly and displayed a farmer’s gratitude for the satisfactory season. He wondered suddenly who’d replace him among them when he retired or died. Father Gowan had had to give up a year ago. The young man, Father White, was always in a hurry.
‘Goodbye so, Canon,’ Mr Willoughby said, shaking hands as he always did, every Sunday. It was a long time since there’d been the trouble about Eugene Dunlevy’s grazing rights; three years ago Mr Willoughby had been left a widower himself. ‘You’re managing all right, Canon?’ he asked, as he also always did.
‘Yes, I’m all right, thank you, Mr Willoughby.’
Someone else inquired if Deirdre was still at the rectory, and he said she was. Heads nodded, the unspoken thought being that that was nice for him, his youngest daughter at home again after all these years. There was forgiveness in several faces, forgiveness of Deirdre, who had been thoughtless to go off to an egg-packing factory. There was the feeling, also unexpressed, that the young were a bit like that.
‘Goodbye,’ he said in a general way. Car doors banged, engines started. In the vestry he removed his surplice and his cassock and hung them in a cupboard.
‘We’ll probably go tomorrow,’ Deirdre said during lunch.
‘Go?’
‘We’ll probably take the Dublin bus.’
‘I’d like to see Dublin,’ Harold said.
‘And then you’re returning to London?’
‘We
’re easy about that,’ Harold interjected before Deirdre could reply. ‘I’m a tradesman, Mr Moran, an electrician.’
‘I know you’re an electrician, Harold.’
‘What I mean is, I’m on my own; I’m not answerable to the bosses. There’s always a bob or two waiting in London.’
For some reason Canon Moran felt that Harold was lying. There was a quickness about the way he’d said they were easy about their plans, and it didn’t seem quite to make sense, the logic of not being answerable to bosses and a bob or two always waiting for him. Harold was being evasive about their movements, hiding the fact that they would probably remain in Dublin for longer than he implied, meeting other people like himself.
‘It was good of you to have us,’ Deirdre said that evening, all three of them sitting around the fire in the drawing-room because the evenings had just begun to get chilly. Harold was reading a book about Che Guevara and hadn’t spoken for several hours. ‘We’ve enjoyed it, Father.’
‘It’s been nice having you, Deirdre.’
‘I’ll write to you from London.’
It was safe to say that: he knew she wouldn’t because she hadn’t before, until she’d wanted something. She wouldn’t write to thank him for the rectory’s hospitality, and that would be quite in keeping. Harold was the same kind of man as Sergeant James had been: it didn’t matter that they were on different sides. Sergeant James had maybe borne an affliction also, a humped back or a withered arm. He had ravaged a country that existed then for its spoils, and his most celebrated crime was neatly at hand so that another Englishman could make matters worse by attempting to make amends. In Harold’s view the trouble had always been that these acts of war and murder died beneath the weight of print in history books, and were forgotten. But history could be rewritten, and for that Kinsella’s Barn was an inspiration: Harold had journeyed to it as people make journeys to holy places.
‘Yes?’ Deirdre said, for while these reflections had passed through his mind he had spoken her name, wanting to ask her to tell him the truth about her friend.
He shook his head. ‘I wish you could have seen your mother again,’ he said instead. ‘I wish she were here now.’
The faces of his three sons-in-law irrelevantly appeared in his mind: Carley’s flushed cheeks, Thomas’s slow good-natured smile, John’s little moustache. It astonished him that he’d ever felt suspicious of their natures, for they would never let his daughters down. But Deirdre had turned her back on the rectory, and what could be expected when she came back with a man? She had never been like Emma or Linda or Una, none of whom smoked Three Castles cigarettes and wore clothes that didn’t seem quite clean. It was impossible to imagine any of them becoming involved with a revolutionary, a man who wanted to commit atrocities.
‘He was just a farmer, you know,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Kinsella.’
Surprise showed in Deirdre’s face. ‘It was Mother we were talking about,’ she reminded him, and he could see her trying to connect her mother with a farmer who had died two hundred years ago, and not beirig able to. Elderliness, he could see her thinking. ‘Only time he wandered,’ she would probably say to her friend.
‘It was good of you to come, Deirdre.’
He looked at her, far into her eyes, admitting to himself that she had always been his favourite. When the other girls were busily growing up she had still wanted to sit on his knee. She’d had a way of interrupting him no matter what he was doing, arriving beside him with a book she wanted him to read to her.
‘Goodbye, Father,’ she said the next morning while they waited in Enniscorthy for the Dublin bus. ‘Thank you for everything.’
‘Yeah, thanks a ton, Mr Moran,’ Harold said.
‘Goodbye, Harold. Goodbye, my dear.’
He watched them finding their seats when the bus arrived and then he drove the old Vauxhall back to Boharbawn, meeting Slattery in his postman’s van and returning his salute. There was shopping he should have done, meat and potatoes, and tins of things to keep him going. But his mind was full of Harold’s afflicted face and his black-rimmed fingernails, and Deirdre’s hand in his. And then flames burst from the straw that had been packed around living people in Kinsella’s Barn. They burned through the wood of the barn itself, revealing the writhing bodies. On his horse the man called Sergeant James laughed.
Canon Moran drove the car into the rectory’s ramshackle garage, and walked around the house to the wooden seat on the front lawn. Frances should come now with two cups of coffee, appearing at the front door with the tray and then crossing the gravel and the lawn. He saw her as she had been when first they came to the rectory, when only Emma had been born; but the grey-haired Frances was somehow there as well, shadowing her youth. ‘Funny little Deirdre,’ she said, placing the tray on the seat between them.
It seemed to him that everything that had just happened in the rectory had to do with Frances, with meeting her for the first time when she was eighteen, with loving her and marrying her. He knew it was a trick of the autumn sunshine that again she crossed the gravel and the lawn, no more than pretence that she handed him a cup and saucer. ‘Harold’s just a talker,’ she said. ‘Not at all like Sergeant James.’
He sat for a while longer on the wooden seat, clinging to these words, knowing they were true. Of course it was cowardice that ran through Harold, inspiring the whisper of his sneer when he spoke of the England he hated so. In the presence of a befuddled girl and an old Irish clergyman England was an easy target, and Ireland’s troubles a kind of target also.
Frances laughed, and for the first time her death seemed far away, as her life did too. In the rectory the visitors had blurred her fingerprints to nothing, and had made of her a ghost that could come back. The sunshine warmed him as he sat there, the garden was less melancholy than it had been.
Sunday Drinks
There was no one else about, not even a cat on the whole extent of the common. The early morning air hadn’t yet been infected by the smell of London, houses were as silent as the houses of the dead. It was half past seven, a Sunday morning in June: on a weekday at this time voices would be calling out, figures already hurrying across the common to Barnes station; the buses would have started. On a weekday Malcolm would be lying for a last five minutes in bed, conserving his energy.
Not yet shaven, a fawn dressing-gown over striped red-and-blue pyjamas, he strolled on the cricket pitch, past the sight-screens and a small pavilion. He was middle-aged and balding, with glasses. Though no eccentric in other ways, he often walked on fine Sunday mornings across the common in his dressing-gown, as far as the poplars that grew in a line along one boundary.
Reaching them now, he turned and slowly made his way back to the house where he lived with Jessica, who was his wife. They’d lived there since he’d begun to be prosperous as a solicitor: an Edwardian house of pleasant brown brick, with some Virginia creeper on it, and bay trees in tubs on either side of the front door. They were a small family: quietly occupying an upstairs room, in many ways no trouble to anyone, there was Malcolm and Jessica’s son.
In the kitchen Malcolm finished Chapter Eight of Edwin Drood and eventually heard the Sunday papers arrive. He went to fetch them, glanced through them, and then made coffee and toast. He took a tray and the newspapers up to his wife.
‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ Jessica said later that morning, in their son’s room. Sometimes he drank it, but often it was still there on the bedside table when she returned at lunchtime. He never carried the cup and saucer down to the kitchen himself and would apologize for that, wagging his head in irritation at his shortcomings.
He didn’t reply when she spoke about the tea. He stared at her and smiled. One hand was clenched close to his bearded face, the fingernails bitten, the fingers gnawed here and there. The room smelt of his sweat because he couldn’t bear to have the window open, nor indeed to have the blind up. He made his models with the electric light on, preferring that to daylight. In the room the m
odels were everywhere: Hurricanes and Spitfires, sea-planes and Heinkel 178s, none of them finished. A month ago, on 25th May, they’d made an attempt to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday.
She closed the door behind her. On the landing walls there was a wallpaper splashed with poppies and cornflowers, which ran down through the house. People often remarked on its pastoral freshness when Jessica opened the hall door to them, though others sometimes blinked. The hall had had a gloomy look before, the paintwork a shade of gravy. Doors and skirting-boards were brightly white now.
‘Let’s not go to the Morrishes’,’ Malcolm suggested in the kitchen, even though he’d put on his Sunday-morning-drinks clothes.
‘Of course we must,’ she said, not wanting to go to the Morrishes’ either. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
In the downstairs lavatory she applied eye-shadow. Her thin face had a shallow look if she didn’t make an effort with make-up; a bit of colour suited her, she reckoned, as it did the hall. She smeared on lipstick and pressed a tissue between her lips to clear away the surplus, continuing to examine her application of eye-shadow in the mirror above the washbasin. Dark hair, greying now, curved around her face. Her deep blue eyes still managed a sparkle that spread beauty into her features, transforming her: nondescript little thing, someone once had said, catching her in a tired moment.
In the kitchen she turned on the extractor tan above the electric cooker; pork chops were cooking slowly in the oven. ‘All right?’ she said, and Malcolm, idling over an advertisement for photochromic lenses, nodded and stood up.
The Collected Stories Page 115