‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said in the McDowds’ kitchen, remembering the photograph of that also: the cream-enamelled electric cooker, the Holy Child on the green-painted dresser, beside the alarm clock and the stack of clothes-pegs, the floor carpeted for cosiness, the blue, formica-topped table, the radio, the television set. In the photograph the kitchen had acquired an extraneous quality, just as the photograph of the Butlers’ yard had. The harsh, ordinary colours, the soiled edges of the curtains, the chipped paintwork, seemed like part of a meticulous composition: the photograph was so much a picture that it invited questioning as a record.
‘We never thought she was going to say that about Maureen,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘It’s lies, Father.’
‘Of course it is, Mrs McDowd.’
‘We all know what happened that night.’
‘Of course we do.’
McDowd said nothing. They had taken the money. It was he who had said that the people should be allowed into the house. Three thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds was the sum the woman had written the cheque for, insisting that the extra money was owed.
‘You never said she’d been specially chosen, Father?’
‘Of course I didn’t, Mrs McDowd.’
He’d heard that Superintendent O’Kelly had gone to see a solicitor to inquire if he’d been libelled, and although he was told he probably had been he was advised that recourse in the courts would be costly arid might not be successful. The simple explanation of what had happened at the Butlers’ farm had been easy for the people of Drimaghleen and for the police to accept because they had known Mrs Butler and they had known her son. There’d been no mystery, there’d been no doubt.
‘Will we say a prayer together?’ the priest suggested.
They knelt, and when they rose again Mrs McDowd began to cry. Everyone would know about it, she said, as if the priest had neither prayed nor spoken. The story would get about and people would believe it. ‘Disadvantaged people’, she quoted from the newspaper. She frowned, still sobbing, over the words. ‘It says the Butlers were disadvantaged people. It says we are disadvantaged ourselves.’
‘That’s only the way that woman has of writing it down, Mrs McDowd. It doesn’t mean much.’
‘These simple farm folk,’ Mrs McDowd read, ‘of Europe’s most western island form limited rural communities that all too often turn in on themselves.’
‘Don’t pay attention,’ Father Sallins advised.
‘Does disadvantaged mean we’re poor?’
‘The way that woman would see it, Mrs McDowd.’
There was confusion now in Drimaghleen, in Kilmona and Mountcroe; and confusion, Father Sallins believed, was insidious. People had been separated from their instinct, and other newspaper articles would follow upon this one. More strangers would come. Father Sallins imagined a film being made about Maureen McDowd, and the mystery that had been created becoming a legend. The nature of Maureen McDowd would be argued over, books would be written because all of it was fascinating. For ever until they died her mother and her father would blame themselves for taking the money their poverty had been unable to turn away.
‘The family’ll see the pictures.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, Mrs McDowd.’
‘No one ever said she was close to being a saint. That was never said, Father.’
‘I know, I know.’
Mrs McDowd covered her face with her hands. Her thin shoulders heaved beneath the pain of her distress; sobs wrenched at her body. Too much had happened to her, the priest thought; it was too much for any mother that her murdered daughter should be accused of murder herself in order to give newspaper-readers something to think about. Her husband had turned away from the table she sat at. He stood with his back to her, looking out into the yard. In a low, exhausted voice he said:
‘What kind of people are they?’
The priest slowly shook his head, unable to answer that, and in the kitchen that looked different in Jeremiah Tyler’s photograph Mrs McDowd screamed. She sat at the blue-topped table with her lips drawn back from her teeth, one short, shrill scream following fast upon another. Father Sallins did not again attempt to comfort her. McDowd remained by the window.
Family Sins
A telegram arrived out of the blue. Come for the weekend, Hubert’s message read, and I remember the excitement I felt because I valued his friendship more than anyone else’s, I had no money for the train journey and had to raise the matter with my father. ‘It’s hard to come by these days,’ my father said, giving me only what he could easily spare. I increased it playing rummy with McCaddy the courthouse clerk, who had a passion for the game.
It was the summer of 1946. Long warm days cast an unobtrusive spell, one following another in what seemed like orderly obedience. The train I took crept through a landscape that was just beginning to lose its verdancy but was not yet parched. The railway for the last few miles of the journey ran by the sea, which twinkled brilliantly, sunlight dancing on it.
‘There’s someone called Pamela,’ Hubert said, greeting me in no other way. ‘Probably I mightn’t have mentioned her.’
We walked from Templemairt railway station, away from the sea, into a tangle of small suburban roads. Everywhere there were boarding-houses, cheaper than those by the promenade, Hubert said. Bookies’ families stayed there, he said: Sans Souci, Freshlea House, Cois na Farraige. We climbed a hill and passed through iron gates into a garden that was also on a hill, steep rockeries on either side of a path with occasional steps in it. I could see the house above us, through hollyhocks and shrubs, a glass veranda stretching the length of its façade.
‘Who’s Pamela?’
‘She spends the summers here. My cousin.’
We entered the house and a voice at once called out. ‘Hubert, I should like to meet your friend.’
‘Hell,’ Hubert muttered. He led me into a small room, its burnt-brown blinds half drawn against the sun. An old woman sat at a piano, turning on the stool as we entered. She was dressed severely, in long, old-fashioned black clothes; her grey hair was swept up and neatly rolled. You could tell she had once been beautiful; and in the wrinkled tiredness of her face her eyes were still young.
‘You are very welcome,’ she said. ‘Hubert does not often invite a friend.’
‘It’s nice of you to have me, Mrs Plunkett.’
The piano stool swivelled again. The first notes of a Strauss waltz were played. I picked my suitcase up and followed Hubert from the room. In the hall he threw his eyes upwards, but did not speak. Silently we mounted the stairs, and when we reached the first-floor landing a woman’s voice called up from some lower part of the house: ‘Hubert, don’t tell me you forgot the honeycomb?’