It was snowing that evening. Huge flakes clung to Barney’s overcoat as he walked to the convent, alone in the silence of the streets. Since Ariadne’s going he had endlessly loitered by the convent, but its windows were always blank, as they were on that Sunday afternoon. Tonight, a dim light burned above the green side-door, but no curtain twitched as he scanned the grey façade, no footsteps disturbed the white expanse beyond the railings. In the depths of the ugly building were the strangeness and the beauty as he had known them, and for a moment he experienced what was left of his passion: a useless longing to change the circumstances there had been.
While he was still in Mrs Lenehan’s house he had thought that somehow he might rescue Ariadne. It was a romantic urge, potent before love began to turn into regret. He had imagined himself ringing the convent bell, and again seeing Ariadne’s face. He had imagined himself smiling at her with all the gentleness he possessed, and walking again with her; and persuading her, when time had passed, that love was possible. ‘You’ll get over her,’ his father had said in the holidays, guessing only that there had been some girl.
A bus creeps through the snow: years later, for Barney, there is that image, a fragment in the cluster that makes the whole. It belongs with the upturned butter-box in the grass and the pinks in the brindle hair of the dog, with Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, and the jockey-capped porters, and the blue-faced Dining Hall clock. A lone figure stares out into the blurred night, hating the good sense that draws him away from loitering gloomily outside a convent.
A Husband’s Return
As dawn lightened Maura Brigid’s bedroom the eyes of the Virgin Mary surveyed her waking face dispassionately. Two fingers of the Holy Child blessed her from a tiny pedestal above the room’s single window. Sleepily recollected, the routine of the day before passed unobtrusively through her thoughts, prefacing the daytime shadow of her desertion by the man she’d loved. This pall of distress reclaimed its potency in the first moments of every day, establishing itself afresh, as the sacred statues did. Then, this morning, Maura Brigid remembered that her sister Bernadette had died.
In his bedroom across the landing Maura Brigid’s brother, Hiney, awoke with the occasion already alive in his consciousness. In the town the family had travelled to a banner had been suspended high up across a street, offering a welcome on behalf of a carnival in the future. Halfway between white iron railings and the church, on a hill, there was a shrine, a pietà, in white also. The yellow grain of the coffin was bright in the sunshine, the face of the priest wan and strained. Hiney pushed back the bedclothes, the àction assisting him to dispel these recollections of a time spent unhappily in an unfamiliar place. Bernadette had run away from the farmhouse with her sister’s husband: that sin had still been ugly at the funeral.
Affected also by the recent death, Mrs Colleary, the mother of Maura Brigid and Hiney, rose an hour later. She released the two blinds in her bedroom and dressed herself in the nondescript wear of a farmer’s widow. He would have gone after Bernadette, she reflected, thinking of her husband; he would have brought her back, and the danger was that he might even have killed Lawless, for his anger had always been difficult to control. It was as well he’d been spared all of it, because nothing he might have done could have lessened the disgrace into which the family had been dragged. Mrs Colleary told her rosary, and prayed for the soul of her husband, and for her daughter’s soul. It was the morning of a Tuesday in May, a month after the funeral.
In another bedroom an old man, distantly related to the family, remained in his bed. Of everyone in the farmhouse, only he no longer dwelt on the scandal that had occurred. He had been upset by it at the time, but with the passing years it had settled in his mind, as had so much else in a long life. He was a small, wizened man who had spent most of that life on this farm. His relationship to the remaining Collearys was vague.
The house where the family lived was large and square and white, facing a grassy hill, its back to the distant sea. The hall door had been nailed in place a long time ago, to keep out draughts; a slated roof, obtusely pitched, was scarcely visible. The gravel sweep that lay between the house and the hill was weedless; the windows that looked out on it were curtained heavily with net and velveteen. The front of the house was where appearances were kept up. At the back a cobbled yard, with a hay-barn and outhouses, and a feed-shed where potatoes and swill were boiled, was less tidy. A porch in need of repair led to sculleries and kitchen.
Weeding a field of mangolds that ran to the edge of the cliffs, Hiney heard in the distance the engine of the post van, and knew by the direction it came from that the van was on its way to the farmhouse. Would an abrupt, buff-enveloped notice announce the withdrawal of the tillage grant? Or was there at last a communication from the Appeal Commissioners? Sunshine warmed Hiney’s shoulders and his head as he bent over the mangolds, the impassive solemnity of his countenance unaffected by speculation. His waistcoat hung loosely; his collarless shirt was held at the neck by a stud. More likely it was the bill for the diesel that brought the post van down the avenue, he guessed.
The old man was visited in his bedroom by Mrs Colleary. She spoke to him about the weather, reporting that it was a brightly sunny morning. But it was always uncertain whether or not he comprehended what was said to him, and this morning he gave no sign that he did. The old man’s age was as mysterious as his relationship to the family; he was perhaps ninety-four or -five. Mrs Colleary visited him first thing every morning to make sure he was all right.
Maura Brigid fried bacon in the kitchen. She had set the table the night before, the last to leave the kitchen, as she always was. She pushed the bacon to one side of the pan and dropped slices of griddle bread into the fat. She heard her brother’s footsteps in the yard, and for an instant imagined his slow walk and his wide, well-shaved face, his dark hair brushed flat on either side of its parting, his lips set dourly, his blue eyes expressionless. Work was what Hiney thought about, work that had been completed, work that had yet to be done. His life was the fields, and his tractor, and the weather.
The letter that had arrived lay on the stone floor of the scullery passage, just inside the door from the yard. When there was a letter the postman opened the back door and placed it on the passage floor, propped against the wall, since there was no letter-box and nowhere else to put it. Entering the house, Hiney picked up the communication that had just been delivered. It was not the bill for the diesel, nor was it about the tillage grant or the appeal that had been lodged with the tax commissioners. It was a white envelope, addressed in a sloping hand to Maura Brigid. Hiney was curious about it. He turned the envelope over, but nothing was written on the back.
In the kitchen Mrs Colleary said she thought the old man would get up today. She always knew if he intended to get up when she visited him first thing. The anticipation of his intentions might have shown as a glimpse in his eyes or in some variation of the sound he emitted when she spoke to him: she had no idea how the impression was conveyed, only that she received it.
‘I have an egg ready to fry for him,’ Maura Brigid said, that being what the old man had for breakfast. Bacon he couldn’t manage.
Hiney placed the letter on the table beside his sister’s knife and fork. He sat where he always sat, on the chair that had been his father’s in his lifetime. ‘Move into his place, Hiney,’ Mrs Colleary had said a few weeks after her husband’s death in 1969, when Hiney was still a boy.