William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

That was the household at Ennismolach, Mrs Bradshaw ill-paid also, her arrival on Tuesdays and Thursdays as much an act of charity on her part as the employment of a one-armed man was on Grattan’s. Sometimes Con Tonan brought one of his children with him, skilfully balancing the child on the crossbar of his bicycle in spite of the absence of an arm.

For twenty-eight years Con Tonan came to the rectory and then, before one winter began, he decided the journey was too much for him. ‘Arrah, I’m too old for it now,’ was all he said when he broke the news of his intentions. It was perhaps because his pension had come through, Mrs Bradshaw suggested, but Grattan knew it wasn’t. It was because Con Tonan was as old as he was, because he was tired.

Mrs Bradshaw was younger. Plump and respectable, she knew all about the greater world, delighting in its conveniences as much as she deplored its excesses. She and Grattan would sit together at the kitchen table on Tuesdays and Thursdays, exchanging the scraps of news she brought for those he had heard that morning on the radio, which she herself rarely turned on.

He sensed her fondness for him — an old man who was a legend in the neighbourhood simply because he’d been a part of it for so long — and sometimes asked her if it was ever said that he was going on beyond his time. Was it said that he was ineffective in his vocation, that he managed ineffectively what remained of his Church’s influence in the amalgamated parishes? He was always reassured. No one wanted him to go, no one wanted some bright young curate to come out from one of the towns on alternate Sundays, to breathe life into what was hardly there.

*

‘Mr Fitzmaurice,’ a red-cheeked, red-haired youth said, arriving at the rectory on a day in the early summer of 1997. ‘My father died.’

Grattan recognized the bicycle the boy dismounted from as the big old Rudge that had once so regularly been pedalled up and down the rectory avenue. He hadn’t seen a child of Con Tonan’s for years, since one by one they’d all become too heavy to be carried on their father’s crossbar.

‘Oh, Seamus, I’m sorry. Come in, come in.’

His one-time gardener had died of a stroke, a mercy he hadn’t lingered: the boy was articulate, slow but clear in delivering the sombre message.

‘He was speechless a day, Mr Fitzmaurice. Then that was the end of it.’ His mother had sent him over, and Grattan was touched that he’d been remembered. The funeral was on Monday.

‘I’ll be there of course, Seamus.’

He made tea and put out biscuits. He asked Seamus if he’d like a boiled egg, but Seamus said no. They talked for a while, until the tea he’d poured was cool and then drunk. Seamus was working for Kelly Bros., who were building two bungalows at Fenit Bridge.

‘Are you all right yourself, Mr Fitzmaurice?’ he enquired before he mounted the bicycle that now was his. It was serving its third generation, having passed on in the same way to his father.

‘Ah, I am, Seamus, I am.’

‘I’ll be off so.’

Mrs Bradshaw brought the same tidings the next morning. A decent, quiet man, she said, which she had not said in Con Tonan’s lifetime. A humble man, who had accepted without bitterness the tragedy that had changed his life. ‘Sure, wasn’t he happy here?’ her comment was, her tone adding one finality to another. She washed their coffee cups at the sink and stacked away the two saucers. She’d brought eggs, she said, the hens beginning to lay again.

On Monday he attended the funeral. He held back afterwards outside the big church that still seemed new, waiting his turn with the widow. He did not know her well; he could remember meeting her only once before, a long time ago.

‘He loved going over to the rectory,’ she said, and as if something in the clergyman’s expression indicated surprise she said it again, her hands grasping one of his. ‘Oh, he did, Mr Fitzmaurice, he did,’ she insisted. ‘It was a good thing in the end, he used say. If he hadn’t had the accident he wouldn’t have got to know Ennismolach Rectory. He wouldn’t have got to know yourself, sir.’

Grattan Fitzmaurice drove away from the funeral, warmed by what had been said to him. Walking with his dog about the garden that had deteriorated in the last few years, although was not as neglected as it had been before he had help in it, he thought about the man who had died, who had become a friend. Con Tonan hadn’t known what a daphne was when first he came, nor what choisya and ceanothus were called. He’d been amazed that raspberry canes were cut down to the ground in the autumn. He’d learnt how to rid the roses of suckers and when to clip the yew hedge, and not to burn the leaves that came down in autumn but to let them decay into mould to enrich the soil. The two men had talked about ordinary things: the weather, and sometimes what a new government intended to do, pondering over which promises would be easy to keep, which would have to be abandoned. In other ways they were separated, but that never mattered.

When Grattan had fed his dog on the evening of the funeral, when he’d boiled himself the couple of eggs he always had at a quarter past seven, with toast and a pot of tea, there was the sound of a car. He opened the front door a few minutes later to the younger of the two priests who had conducted the service. Smiling, hand out, Father Leahy said, ‘I thought I’d come over.’

He said it easily, as if he were in the habit of calling in regularly at the rectory, as if he knew from long experience that this was a good moment. But neither he nor Father MacPartlan had ever driven up to Ennismolach Rectory before.

‘Come in, come in,’ Grattan invited. The curate’s handshake had been firm, the kind you can feel the friendliness in.

‘Isn’t that a lovely evening, Mr Fitzmaurice? Are we in for a heatwave?’

‘I’d say we might be.’

In the big drawing-room all the furniture was old but not old enough to be valuable: armchairs and a sofa shabby from wear, plant stands and rickety little tables with books and ornaments on them, sun-browned wallpaper cluttered with pictures and photographs, a tarnished looking-glass huge above the white marble mantelpiece, a card-table with a typewriter on it. The long curtains — once two shades of blue — were almost colourless now and in need of repair.

‘You’ll take a cup of tea, Father?’

‘Ah no, no. Thanks though, Mr Fitzmaurice.’

‘Well, we’ve lost poor Con.’

‘God rest him.’

‘I missed him when coming out here was too much for him in the end.’

Glancing beside him as he sat down, Grattan noticed the Irish Times , where earlier he had placed it on the table by his armchair. His eye had been caught then, as it was now, by the grinning countenance of Father Brendan Smyth being taken into custody by a grim-faced detective. Paedophile Priest is Extradited , the headline ran. He reached out and turned the newspaper over.

‘You’d miss Con, of course.’ There was a pause, and then Father Leahy added, ‘You’re a long way from the world here.’

‘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.