‘Who blessed the union of Adam and Eve, then?’ Pat asked. ‘Don’t tell me there was a priest.’
‘God did.’
‘Very well,’ Pat said, ‘let Fitz ask God to bless the union and go ahead. It won’t do any harm, and he’ll save a few bob.’
‘It was all right for Adam and Eve,’ Joe said, ‘but now the Church has the sacrament of marriage.’
‘A class of modern convenience,’ Pat said, ‘like the electric tram. If you want to know, it was the capitalists who invented marriage in order to protect the laws of inheritance.’
‘You’re too bitter altogether against religion,’ Joe said.
‘Maybe you’d have me like Keever, asking the office clerk to give him the stamps to save for the black babies.’
‘I suppose if he was collecting stamps for Karl Marx he’d be a hero,’ Joe snarled.
‘I’d be satisfied for a start if he began paying his subscription to the union.’
‘He’s only trying to help the missionaries.’
‘The missionaries do more harm than good.’
Exasperated, Joe appealed to Fitz.
‘There’s not a charitable drop in him,’ he accused.
‘Charity begins with my own class,’ Pat insisted.
‘And isn’t Keever your own class?’ Joe shouted.
‘No,’ Pat shouted back. ‘Because he’s against us. He that is not with me is against me.’
‘Now he has the bloody nerve to quote the Bible at me,’ Joe protested.
Fitz said: ‘For God’s sake stop talking like a pair of public meetings.’
They both glared at each other in silence.
‘I’m getting married at Easter,’ Fitz said, ‘and I’m asking if you’ll move in with me so that I can hold on to the flat when it’s left empty. If you don’t want to do that, say so.’
‘Of course I’ll move in with you,’ Pat said, ‘if you haven’t got the courage to go against the institutions of capitalist society.’
‘I haven’t. Does that satisfy you?’
‘It doesn’t,’ Pat said, ‘but I’ll have to put up with it, I suppose.’
He felt the drawers and judged them to be dried out enough to hang on a line that stretched from the bedpost to the corner of the fireplace. He drew the legs down so that they hung at full length.
‘They’re nearly as holy as Keever himself,’ he remarked.
Joe opened his mouth but had to close it again. He could think of nothing to say.
Winter took a heavy toll of life in the parish of St. Brigid, where the old succumbed to the usual diseases. Parish duties kept Father O’Connor busy. People asked for the priest, were anointed, and left the overcrowded rooms for whatever place God and their way of living had prepared for them. He found the dirt and the poverty hard to get used to. Even the room he slept in joined forces with the weather and fell in league with the district that surrounded it. There were damp spots on the wall and damp patches on the painting of Our Lady of Sorrows. When the window was open the noise of trains and traffic was unbearable; when it was closed the room became musty and unpleasant. The iron-framed bed was a double one, unpriestly and lonely. Father Giffley continued to be boorish and unfriendly.
‘A charitable society,’ he repeated, ‘I am more interested in your finding me another boilerman.’
The boilerman who had tended the unreliable contraption which heated the water system for the church, had been one of the winter’s victims. His body was due to arrive at the church that evening.
Father O’Connor said: ‘I have been enquiring about a deserving case.’
‘You want a charitable society,’ Father Giffley said with a snort, ‘yet you are unable to find a deserving case.’
‘The poor man is only dead two days.’
‘Throw a stone from any window in the parish of St. Brigid. You’re bound to hit a hungry wretch.’
‘He must be trustworthy.’
‘For ten shillings a week—impossible.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Father O’Connor submitted. If his superior did his share of the duties there might be more time to attend to the matter he was complaining of. Father O’Connor resisted the temptation to say so.
‘Hanlon was a gentle poor old dodderer,’ Father Giffley brooded.
‘His chest was bad, I understand.’
‘He didn’t die of a surfeit of piety, anyway, the poor soul.’
‘His language was sometimes objectionable.’
Father Giffley was surprisingly tolerant. ‘It’s their physic against ill health,’ he said. ‘As for charitable societies—charity in this parish must remain the monopoly of the Protestants. They have the money. We haven’t.’
‘We lost a family to them last week,’ Father O’Connor said, using an argument that Father Giffley, he felt certain, could not dare to ignore. But his superior took it as a necessary part of the pattern.
‘A bowl of soup, a hot bath—and then they wash them in the Blood of the Lamb,’ he said. ‘Do you know, I’ve heard them singing in the streets a thing that goes: “Yes, we shall gather at the River”. Grown adults warbling about gathering at the river is beyond me.’
‘I think the river is figurative, representing the flow of grace . . .’
Father Giffley sat upright.
‘Do I need explanations of what is obvious and elementary?’ He left down his whiskey glass.
‘What family has apostasised?’
The word startled Father O’Connor. It fell into the room with an evil and terrible sound.
‘People named Conlan. Keever, one of my confraternity men, told me. I’ve tried to trace them but they seem to have moved into another parish.’
‘They always do,’ Father Giffley said.
‘It happens often, then . . . ?’
‘No, not often. Our parishioners keep the Faith. It is the only thing most of them have.’
‘That is why I am anxious to start some kind of relief fund.’
‘Without money?’
‘The ladies of the parish . . .’
‘There are no ladies in the parish of St. Brigid; except, of course, a few ladies of light virtue. And even they find it difficult to live.’
‘I was going to say—the ladies of the parish of Kingstown. Some of them are very interested.’
‘Have you asked them?’
‘I have described the conditions here. They seemed anxious to help.’
Father Giffley looked at the young man for some time, his eyes reflective, his cheeks veined and swollen. He hated the fair hair and pale, unlined face. He hated the humble manner and the bowed head, the zeal for good works which he was convinced was an outlet for a strange form of snobbery. Father Giffley, while his junior waited patiently for a decision, let his mind wander through the parish he had spent so many lonely years in. He hated it too, and made no effort to do otherwise. In his own way he pitied the people. He had no contempt for them. It was not their fault that they were born into poverty or that the rooms they inhabited were overcrowded. The filth they lived in was unavoidable. And this self-centred young fool wanted to scratch at the surface.
Father Giffley said:
‘Some form of relief fund? Very well. You have my permission, Father.’
He held up his glass and regarded it through half-closed eyes. There would be words of gratitude.
‘I am deeply grateful, Father.’
That was the phrase Father Giffley had anticipated. He smiled at his glass, as though it, too, had guessed aright.
‘When will you start?’
‘At the earliest moment . . . with your permission?’
There it was again. Deeply grateful. With your permission.
‘Do you think, Father, that the widow who gave her mite may have had it from the ladies of Kingstown?’
Father O’Connor flushed. He did not know what his superior meant, except that he intended to be insulting.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Father.’