A Bit on the Side (6 page)

‘Ah no, Justina, no,’ he said.

‘Will I say a Hail Mary for Maeve, Father?’

‘You wouldn’t want to go up to Dublin, Justina. You wouldn’t want to upset your sister more.’

‘It’s only Breda’s gone up there.’

‘I know, I know.’

When they were no more than five or six he remembered the two of them playing in Diamond Street, Justina’s black hair cut in a fringe and curling in around her face, Breda as thin as a weasel. She’d been the bane of the nuns when she’d attended the convent, sly and calculating, all knowing talk and unspoken defiance. She’d plastered herself with lipstick when she was older; in the end she’d worn a T-shirt with an indecency on it.

‘Would it be bad to go up on the bus, Father?’

‘I think maybe it would. Have you anything else to confess, Justina?’

‘Only Maeve was crying.’

‘Light a candle when you’ll leave the confessional. Do the floor on Saturday, do the brasses.’

Again he remembered her standing on her own by the shrine outside the church after her First Communion, her face held up to the sunshine, the lily-of-the-valley tightly clenched. Before she left the confessional he murmured a prayer for her, knowing that was what she liked to hear best of all. It frightened him that she might visit her friend, that she might forget what he had said, that somehow she might acquire the bus fare, that she’d go, not telling anyone.

*

Two days later, when Justina was washing the church floor, Father Clohessy called at the house in Diamond Street.

‘Come in, Father, come in,’ Mr Gilfoyle said.

He led the way into a room where a football match was in progress on the television, Aston Villa and Arsenal. His son had been watching it, Mr Gilfoyle said, but then a call had come through, a tank overflowing on the McCarron estate. Mr Gilfoyle turned the football off. Maeve had gone out for rashers. She’d be back in no time, he said.

They talked about a job Mr Gilfoyle had done years ago in the church, putting in a sink in the vestry. Father Clohessy said it was still going strong; in use all the time, he said.

‘A Belfast sink,’ Mr Gilfoyle said. ‘A Belfast sink was the name we had for that fellow. You wouldn’t see the better of it.’

‘No.’

‘Sit down, Father. I have to sit down myself. I have trouble in the old legs.’

A sound came from the kitchen. Mr Gilfoyle called out to his daughter-in-law that Father Clohessy was here and when Maeve came in, still in her coat, a scarf tied round her hair, Father Clohessy said:

‘I wanted a word about Justina.’

‘She’s being a nuisance to you?’

‘Ah no, no.’

‘She lives in that church.’

‘Justina’s welcome, Maeve. No, it’s only she was mentioning Breda Maguire. I’m concerned in case Justina might try to make her way to Dublin.’

There was a silence then. The priest was aware of Mr Gilfoyle being about to say something and changing his mind, and of Maeve’s unbelieving stare. He watched while she restrained herself: once or twice before, she had been abrupt to the point of rudeness when he’d been concerned about her sister. He didn’t say anything himself; the silence went on.

‘She never would,’ Maeve said at last.

Successful in controlling her irritation, she failed to keep an errant note of hope out of her tone. It flickered in her eyes and she shook her head, as if to deny that it was there.

‘How could she, Father?’

‘The bus goes every day.’

‘She’d need money. She spends every penny soon as she gets it.’

‘I just thought I’d say. So you could keep an eye on her.’

Maeve did not respond to that. Mr Gilfoyle said Justina would never board that bus. He’d walk down to the square himself and keep a look-out where the bus drew in.

‘It would be worse if she got a lift off someone.’

Wearily, Maeve closed her eyes when Father Clohessy said that. She sighed and turned away, struggling with her anger, and Father Clohessy felt sorry for her. It wasn’t easy, she did her best.

‘We’ll keep an eye on her,’ she said.

*

That night, when Father Clohessy closed his church after the late Saturday Mass, he wondered if he had become prey to despair, the worst sin of all in the canon that was specially a priest’s. At street corners, in the square, men stood in conversation, lit cigarettes, argued the chances of Offaly the next day. Women linked arms, talking as they strolled. Children carried away chips from O’Donnell’s. The grandeur might have gone from his church, his congregations dwindling, his influence fallen away to nothing, but there was money where there’d been poverty, ambition where there’d been humility. These were liberated people who stood about in ways that generations before them had not. They wore what they wished to wear, they said what they wished to say, they stayed or went away. Was it much of a price to pay that the woman he had visited would rid herself of a backward sister if she could? It was on a Saturday evening little different from this one that he had first read the legend on Breda Maguire’s T-shirt, bold yellow letters on black, simple and straightforward:
Fuck Me.

On the streets of the town he had always known, people spoke to him, warmly, with respect. They wished him good night, they wished him well. He could not blame them if in his sermons he didn’t know what to say to them any more. He should apologize, yet knew he must not. In the square, he entered the Emmet Bar, between the old Munster and Leinster Bank, now an AIB branch, and Mulvany’s television shop. Father Finaghy always called in on Saturdays after they closed the church, and he sometimes did himself – to drink a couple of glasses of Beamish’s stout and smoke a couple of cigarettes while he talked to two men with whom he had attended the Christian Brothers’ forty years ago. Both had done well enough in the new prosperity, had fathered children and seen them educated, were decent men. He liked them as much as he always had, even sometimes was envious of their uncomplicated lives. They, not he, did the talking in the Emmet Bar, always sensitive to the doth he wore. They neither of them had mentioned it when a few years ago a well-loved bishop had been exposed as the begetter of a child, nor when there had been other misdemeanours on the part of other clergymen.

‘Bring us the same, Larry,’ the bulkier of the two called out, a brightly coloured tie loosened in his collar, freckles darkening his forehead. Clumsy hands pushed the empty glasses across the bar. ‘And one for the Father.’

‘I wouldn’t see Offaly victorious,’ his companion remarked, tidier, wiry, a salesman of agricultural implements. ‘No way.’

Music was faint in the crowded bar, as if coming from some other room or conveyed through apparatus that was faulty; laughter exploded in guffaws, or rippled, hardly heard.

‘Thanks,’ Father Clohessy said, reaching for the glass that had been filled for him.

There would be embarrassment if he mentioned the Church’s slow collapse. There would be an awkwardness; best not said, his friends’ opinion would be. Sometimes you had to close your mind down.

A sense of isolation, often creeping up on him during a Saturday evening in the Emmet Bar, did so again. Centuries of devotion had created a way of life in which the mystery of the Trinity was taken for granted, the Church’s invincible estate a part of every day, humility part of it, too, instead of rights plucked out of nowhere, order abandoned in favour of confusion. What priests and bishops had been – their strength and their parish people’s salvation – was mocked in television farces, deplored, presented as absurdity. That other priests in other towns, in cities, in country parishes, were isolated by their celibacy, by the mourning black of their dress, had been a consolation once, but that source of comfort had long ago dried up.

The Offaly flags would be hoisted all right if Ger Toibin had been fit, his companions were agreeing. The final score was predicted; he joined in that, the talk went on. Houses were to be built on the Tinakilty road where the old cement works had been. Madden’s Hotel would be closed for six months while improvements were put in. There were rumours of a fertilizer outfit taking over Williamson’s Yard.

‘Are you off so?’ Father Clohessy heard himself asked when half an hour had passed, then heard it said that he would surely have another.

He shook his head, finishing his second cigarette and stubbing out the butt. There were a few more exchanges, before he pushed his way through the drinkers, his hand shaken once or twice, salutes of farewell.

In the darkening streets of the town his reverie continued. A kind of truth it was, somewhere at the heart of his vocation, that there should be awareness of the holy world that was lost – yet he could not ever deny that vocation claimed its postulants as it wished. Companionable and easy, Father Finaghy led the singsongs in the Emmet Bar on a Saturday evening, a little tipsy and none the worse for that.

Slowly, as Father Clohessy walked on, these well-worn reflections were left behind in the town that was half closed down for the night. Nothing replaced them for a while, before the careful hands of Justina Casey lifted down the altar ornaments, her polishing rags and Brasso pads tidily laid out. She touched away from a lily a petal that had gone brown. She scraped off the candle grease that had accumulated on the candle-holders. She re-arranged the missionary leaflets.

It was what there was; it was what he had, whether he understood it or not. Justina Casey would stay in the town because Mr Gilfoyle would make sure she didn’t get on the Dublin bus; Maeve would keep an eye on her; after a time Breda Maguire would forget about her. In the confined space of the confessional there would again be the unnecessary confessions, again the granting of absolution. Then happiness would break in the face that saw God in his own.

An Evening Out

In the theatre bar they still talked, not hurrying over their drinks although an announcement had warned that the performance would begin in two minutes. There were more people in the bar than it could comfortably accommodate, crushed close against the bar itself and in the corners, some just beginning to make their way through the several doorways to the auditorium.

‘The performance will begin in one minute,’ the peremptory Tannoy voice reminded, and quite suddenly the bar was almost empty.

The barman was a character, gloomy-faced, skin and bone, bespectacled; lank like old string, he said himself. The barmaid was younger by quite a bit, and cheerfully plump.

‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘That woman.’

One woman had not left with the others and showed no sign of doing so. She was in a corner, sitting at one of the few tables the bar provided. All around her, on the shelf that ran around the walls, on the seats of chairs, there were empty glasses. Her own was three-quarters full of gin and tonic.

‘Deaf, d’you think?’ the barman wondered and the barmaid remarked that the theatre was never a place for the hard of hearing, it stood to reason. It could be of course that a deaf-aid had been temporarily turned off and then forgotten.

The woman they spoke of was smartly dressed, two shades of green; a coat that was tweed on one side and waterproof on the other was draped over the other chair at her table. The remains of beauty strikingly lit her features, seeming to be there less casually, less incidentally, than beauty might have been earlier in her life. Touches of grey were allowed in her fair hair, adding a distinction that went with the other changes time had wrought.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ the barman said, ‘but the performance has begun.’

*

What a city London is! Jeffrey thought, staring up at the dark bronze features of Sir Henry Ha velock beneath the sprinkling of pigeon droppings that lightened the soldier’s crown. The last of an April twilight was slipping away, the city at its best, as it also was – in Jeffrey’s view – when dawn was turning into day. In Trafalgar Square the traffic was clogged, a crawl of lumbering red buses and patient taxis, a cyclist now and again weaving through. People gathered at the crossing lights, seeming to lose something of themselves in each small multitude while obediently they waited to move forward when the signal came. Pigeons swooped above territory they claimed as theirs, and landed on it to waddle after tit-bits, or snapped at one another, flapping away together into the sky, still in dispute.

Jeffrey turned away from it all, from Sir Henry Havelock and the pigeons and the four great lions, the floodlights just turned on, illuminating the facade of the National Gallery. ‘Won’t do to keep her waiting,’ he murmured, causing two girls who were passing to snigger. He kept her waiting longer, for when he reached it he entered the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane and ordered a Bell’s, and then called out that it had better be a double.

He needed it. Truth to tell, he needed a second but he shook away the thought, reprimanding himself: neither of them would get anywhere if he was tipsy. On the street again he searched the pockets of his mackintosh for the little plastic container that was rattling somewhere, and when he found it in his jacket he took two of his breath fresheners.

*

Evelyn drew back slightly from the barman’s elderly, untidy face, from cheeks that fell into hollows, false teeth. He said again that the performance had begun.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Actually, I’m waiting for someone.’

‘We could send your friend in if you liked to go on ahead. If you have your ticket. They’re sometimes not particular about a disturbance before a play’s got going.’

‘No, actually we’re just meeting here. We’re not going to the theatre.’

She read, behind heavily rimmed lenses, bewilderment in the man’s eyes. It was unusual, she read next, the thought flitting through his confusion. He settled for that, a conclusion reached.

‘You didn’t mind my asking? Only I said to my colleague where’s the need for both of them to be late if they have their tickets on them?’

‘It’s very kind of you.’

‘Thank you, madam.’

Near to where she sat he cleared the shelf of glasses, wiped it down with a damp grey cloth, moved on, expertly balancing the further glasses he collected. ‘Lady’s waiting for her friend,’ he said to the barmaid, who was washing up at a sink behind the bar. ‘They’re not attending the show tonight.’