William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘I often think of those monks on the islands,’ Father Leahy said. ‘Any acre they’d spot out on the sea they would row off to to see could they start a community there.’

‘They would.’

‘Cowled against the wind. Or cowled against what’s left behind. Afraid, Father MacPartlan says. When Father MacPartlan comes in to breakfast you can see the rims of his eyes red.’

An image of the older priest was vivid for a moment in Grattan’s recall, his mourning black, the collar cutting into pink flesh, hair that had thinned and gone grey over the years of their acquaintanceship. That this man wept in the night was barely credible.

‘I never left Ireland,’ Father Leahy said. ‘I have never been outside it.’

‘Nor I.’ The silence after that was part of the dark, easily there, not awkward. And Grattan said, ‘I love Ireland.’

They loved it in different ways: unspoken in the dark, that was another intimation. For Grattan there was history’s tale, regrets and sorrows and distress, the voices of unconquered men, the spirit of women as proud as empresses. For Grattan there were the rivers he knew, the mountains he had never climbed, wild fuchsia by a seashore and the swallows that came back, turf smoke on the air of little towns, the quiet in long glens. The sound, the look, the shape of Ireland, and Ireland’s rain and Ireland’s sunshine, and Ireland’s living and Ireland’s dead: all that.

On Sundays, when Mass was said and had been said again, Father Leahy stood in a crowd watching the men of Kildare and Kerry, of Offaly and Meath, yelling out encouragement, deploring some lack of skill. And afterwards he took his pint as any man might, talking the game through. For Father Leahy there was the memory of the cars going by, his bare feet on the cobbles of the yard, the sacrifice he had made, and his faithful coming to him, the cross emblazoned on a holy robe. Good Catholic Ireland, a golden age.

‘Anywhere you’d be,’ Grattan said, ‘there’s always change. Like day becoming night.’

‘I know. Sure, I know of course.’

Father Leahy’s cigarette dropped on to the ground. There was the sound of his shoe crunching away the spark left in the butt, then his footsteps began on the gravel. A light came on when he opened the car door.

‘You’re not left bereft, you know,’ Grattan said.

‘Father MacPartlan looked over the table tonight after he’d put sugar in his tea. What he said to me was you’d given Con Tonan his life back. Even though Con Tonan wasn’t one of your own.’

‘Ah, no, no, I didn’t do that.’

‘D’you know the way it sometimes is, you want to tell a person a thing?’

The curate’s hand was held out in the little pool of light, and there was the same friendliness in the clasp before he started the car’s engine.

‘Father Leahy called in last night,’ Grattan heard himself reporting to Mrs Bradshaw. ‘The first time a priest ever came to the rectory that I remember.’ And Mrs Bradshaw, astonished, would think about it all morning while she worked, and would probably say before she left that the curate calling in was an expression of the ecumenical spirit they were all on about these days. Something like that.

For a few more minutes Grattan remained outside, a trace of tobacco smoke still in the garden, the distant hum of the curate’s car not quite gone. The future was frightening for Father Leahy, as it had been for the monks who rowed away from Ireland once, out on to their rocks; as it had been for his father on his deathbed. But the monks and his father had escaped, mercy granted them. The golden age of the bishops was vanishing in a drama that was as violent as the burning of the houses and the fleeing of the families, and old priests like Father MacPartlan were made melancholy by their loss and passed their melancholy on.

‘Come on, Oisín,’ Grattan called, for his dog had wandered in the garden. ‘Come on now.’

He had paid Con Tonan what he could; he’d been glad of his company. He had never thought of Con Tonan in his garden as a task he’d been given, as a single tendril of the vine to make his own. But the priest had come this evening to say it had been so, and by saying it had found a solace for himself. Small gestures mattered now, and statements in the dark were a way to keep the faith, as the monks had kept it in an Ireland that was different too.

Good News

‘Hi,’ the bald man with the earrings said. ‘I’m Roland.’

He looked at Bea from behind small, round spectacles. She watched his gaze passing slowly over her features, over her shoulders and her chest, her hands on the table between them. Bea was nine, with dark hair that was long, and brown eyes with a dreamy look that was sometimes mistaken for sadness.

‘You’re going to show us, Leah?’ the man with earrings said, and the girl who stood beside him, in a navy-blue jumper and jeans, ran a finger down a list on her clipboard and told him the name was Bea.

‘Take your time, Leah,’ the man said.

Bea had practised, the curtains drawn so that it was dark, Iris suddenly switching on the table lamp. Waking up on the sofa, wondering where she was, was what was marked on the script as the bit they would ask her to do.

She crossed to where two chairs were drawn close together to represent the sofa. She lay down on them and waited for the girl with the clipboard to say she’d switched the light on, as she’d said she would. Bea’s hands went up then, shielding her eyes, not making too much of the gesture, not milking it, as Iris had explained you never should, subtlety being everything.

‘Quite nice,’ the man with the earrings said.

*

Iris was Bea’s mother. Iris Stebbing she’d been born, but she’d turned that into Iris Orlando for professional purposes, and Iris Adams she’d become when she married Dickie. It was several years since she had gone for a part herself — ‘woman in massage parlour’ — which they’d said at the last minute she wasn’t quite right for. Occasionally she still rang up about a forthcoming production she’d read about in The Stage and they always promised to bear her in mind. But they never rang back.

Bea was different, with everything ahead of her. And Bea had talent, Iris was certain of that. She could see her one day as Ophelia, or the young just-married in Outward Bound , which she had played herself, or Rachel-Elizabeth in Bring on the Night . Iris had taught Bea all she knew.

Another child came in to wait, with a stout young woman who was presumably a mother too, unhealthy-looking, Iris considered. The child was timid, which of course was what they wanted, but rabbity in appearance, which Iris doubted they’d want, not for a minute. Bea was quiet, always had been, but she didn’t look half dead. More to the point, she didn’t have teeth like that.

‘Hi,’ the mother said.

Iris wrinkled her lips a bit, the smile she gave to strangers. There would be others, of course. Every fifteen minutes, they’d keep coming all morning. She knew the drill.

Iris was not a young mother herself. She hadn’t wanted to have children, but when she reached forty she had suddenly felt panicky, which of course — she readily admitted — was her all over. She had a part in the hospital serial then, but she’d begun to think she’d never have another one. The last year in Wanstead it was. Dickie was still on the road, office stationery.

Another mother and another child came in, the mother even younger than the fat one, the child brazen-faced, not right at all. They liked to be early, half an hour at least, and this time there was no greeting, nothing said, no smiles. Competitiveness had taken over; Iris could feel it in herself, a mounting dislike of those she shared the small waiting-room with.