The fingers of Father Clohessy’s hands were locked together as he listened, that being his usual pose in the confessional, head turned so that one ear could pick up the revelations that were coming through the gauze of the grille. Among his confessants, it was only Justina he ever interrupted and he did so now.
‘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.