‘I’m used to that.’
He wondered if his gesture with the paper had been noticed. He had meant it as a courtesy, but a courtesy could be offensive. Long way from the world or not, it was impossible not to be aware of the Norbertine priest’s twenty-year-long persecution of children in Belfast. One sentence already served in Magilligan Prison in County Derry, he was now on his way to face seventy-four similar charges in Dublin. All day yesterday the News had been full of it.
‘It was good of you to attend the funeral, Mr Fitzmaurice.’
‘I was fond of Con.’
The funeral service had impressed him. There’d been confidence in its ceremony and its ritual, in the solemn voice of Father MacPartlan, in Father Leahy’s, in the responses of the congregation. It was there again in the two priests’ gestures, hands raised to give the blessing, in the long line of communicants and the coffin borne away, the graveside exhortations. Founded on a rock, Grattan had thought: you felt that here. The varnished pews were ugly, the figure in the Stations of the Cross lifeless, but still you felt the confidence and the rock.
‘Mrs Tonan said the same thing, that it was good of you to come. ’Tis difficult sometimes for a parishioner to understand that someone of your Church would want to.’
‘Ah well, of course I would.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
There was a silence. Then Father Leahy said:
‘That’s a great dog.’
‘I’d be lost without Oisín.’
‘You always had a dog. I always associate a dog with you in the car.’
‘Company.’ And Grattan thought you didn’t often see a priest with a dog. Maybe once in a while you would, but not often. He didn’t say so in case it sounded intrusive. He remembered Father Leahy as a child, one of the Leahys from the white farmhouse on the Ballytoom road. Three brothers he remembered, swinging their legs on a whitewashed wall, waving at him whenever he drove past. The priest would be the youngest, the youngest in all the family, someone told him once. Four girls there were as well.
‘We neither of us moved far off,’ he said, and Father Leahy nodded, affirming his understanding of how the conversation had drifted in this direction.
‘We didn’t, right enough,’ he said.
Grattan wondered why the curate had come. Had he decided to pay the visit when he saw the lone figure at the funeral? Had he come to offer half an hour of companionship, maybe out of pity? Had the two priests said after the service that perhaps the occasion had been hard to bear for a Protestant clergyman, with nothing of a flock left?
‘Your family scattered?’ He kept the conversation going, feeling that was required of him.
‘Mostly.’
The farm was still run by the brother who’d inherited it, Young Pat. There was another brother in Cleveland, Ohio. The sisters had all gone, married in different parts of the country, two in Cork.
‘We used meet up at Christmas, a few of us anyway. They’d come back to the farm, but then the girls have families of their own now. They don’t want to be travelling.’
‘I remember you sitting on that wall.’
‘We used learn off the car numbers. Not that there were many, maybe two a day. ZB 726.’
‘Was that my old Morris?’
‘The slopey-back green Morris. You used put out one of your indicators when you went by, waving at us. D’you remember that? The little orange yoke?’
‘I bought that car from Mr Keane in the Bank of Ireland. Would you have known Mr Keane?’
‘I would, of course. Wasn’t it Keane himself lent my father the price of the milking parlour? A decent man.’
Protestants were often called decent. You knew where you were with Protestants: that was said often in those days. Straight-dealing was what was meant, the quality not begrudged. The bank manager had been the churchwarden at Ennismolach.
‘Father MacPartlan remembers your father. Your mother too.’
Grattan imagined Father MacPartlan mentioning them, telling his curate about the old days, how the big houses had been burnt down, the families driven from them, how the rectories had escaped. ‘Wouldn’t you call round on the old fellow one of these evenings?’ he imagined Father MacPartlan urging. ‘If it wouldn’t be taken wrong?’ And the bluff tones of the older priest continued to disturb Grattan’s thoughts, instructing the curate in mercy and understanding, reminding him of the spirit of the different times. After all, it was said also, all three of them shared the cloth.
‘Would you care for a stroll in the garden, Father?’
‘Well, that would be grand.’
Dusk had settled in. With the dog a few paces behind them, the two men passed from path to path, going slowly, shrubs and flowers pointed out. Father Leahy, like Con Tonan once, knew the names of hardly anything.
‘Con knocked the garden into shape for me.’
‘His wife was saying you taught him the way of it.’
‘Oh, at first of course. He ended knowing more than I did myself. He loved the old garden before he was done with it.’
‘He was a long time here.’
‘He was.’
‘Near enough the time Father MacPartlan entered the priesthood it would have been when he came to you.’
The air was fragrant with the scent of night stock, there was the sound of Oisín rooting in the undergrowth. Rabbits came into the garden, and one scuttled away now.
‘Father MacPartlan came off a farm, like I did myself. A lot of priests in Ireland came off a farm.’
‘They still do, I’m told.’
‘Simple enough lads at first.’
‘Yes.’
It seemed to Grattan that they were talking about something else. Nothing was ever entirely as it seemed, he found himself thinking, and didn’t know why he did.
‘Different for yourself, I’d say, Mr Fitzmaurice.’
Grattan laughed. ‘Oh, I knew what I was in for.’
They stood by the barbed-wire fence at the bottom of the garden, looking out into the shadows of pasture land beyond. Heifers were grazing there, but you could hardly see them now. Shadowy themselves, the two black-clad figures turned and walked back the way they’d come. It didn’t seem likely, a sudden realization came to Grattan, that the priests had spoken in the way he’d thought, that the curate had been instructed in mercy and understanding. When you imagined, you were often wrong, and again he wondered why his visitor was here.
‘It’s a big old house,’ Father Leahy said. ‘It would always have been a rectory, would it?’
‘Oh, it was built as a rectory all right. 1791.’
‘It’ll see a few years yet.’
‘A lot of the clergy would prefer something smaller these days.’
‘But not yourself?’
‘You’re used to a place.’
In front of the house again, twilight giving way to the dark now, they stood by Father Leahy’s car, a silence gathering, the small talk of the conversation running out. Oisín ambled over the gravel and settled himself patiently on the front-door steps. Father Leahy said:
‘I never knew a place as peaceful.’
‘Any time you’re near by come in again, Father.’
There was the flare of a match, then the glow of the priest’s cigarette, tobacco pleasant on the evening air, mingling with the flowers.
‘It wasn’t easy, I dare say.’ Father Leahy’s face was lost in the dark now, only the glow of the cigarette’s tip moving, his voice trailing off.
‘Easy, Father?’
‘I meant for yourself.’
It seemed to Grattan that it was possible to say that in the dark, when it hadn’t been before, that truth could flourish in the dark, that in the dark communication was easier.
‘Time was, a priest in Ireland wouldn’t read the Irish Times. Father MacPartlan remarks on that. But we take it in now.’
‘I thought maybe that picture —’
‘There’s more to it all than what that picture says.’