Fifty-four and becoming stout, his red hair cut short around a freckled pate, Father Clohessy watched while Justina Casey dipped the tips of her fingers in the holy water and blessed herself before she left the church. Her footsteps were soft on the tiles, as if her devotion demanded that, as if she were of less importance than the sacred ground she walked on, less than the burning candles and the plaster Virgin, less even than the unread missionary leaflets. He remembered her at her First Communion, standing out a bit from the other children, a scraggy bunch of lily-of-the-valley pressed close to her. It was afterwards that she’d asked him if she could look after the brass.
The door of the church closed soundlessly behind her and Father Clohessy was aware of an emptiness, of something taken from him.
*
Justina dawdled, examining the goods in the shop windows. There were the tins of sweets in Hehir’s, and the glass jars in a row behind them, half full of the mixtures, the jelly babies and bull’s-eyes, soft-centred fruits, toffees. There were the fashions in Merrick’s, the window changed only a week ago, meat in Cranly’s, delft and saucepans in Nation’s. A fine dust had gathered on the dry goods in MacGlashan’s, on packets of Barry’s tea and the advertisements for Bisto and chicken-and-ham paste. Cabbage drooped outside Mrs Scally’s, the green fringe of the carrots was tinged with yellow.
‘How’s Justina?’ Mrs Scally enquired from the doorway, the flowered overall that encased her girth crossed over on itself beneath her folded arms. She always had her arms folded, Justina’s thought was as she stopped to hear what else Mrs Scally had to say. One shoulder taking the weight against the door-jamb, a single curler left in her hair, slippers on her feet and the folded arms: that was Mrs Scally unless she was weighing out potatoes or wrapping a turnip. ‘All right,’ Justina said. ‘I’m all right, Mrs Scally.’
‘I have apples in. Will you tell them up in the house I have apples in?’
‘I will.’
‘There’s a few tins of peaches that’s dinged. I wouldn’t charge the full.’
‘You told me that, Mrs Scally.’
‘Did you mention it in the house?’
‘I did surely.’
Justina passed on. She had spoken to Maeve about the peaches and her sister hadn’t said anything. But Mr Gilfoyle had heard her saying it and he’d laughed. When Micksie came in he said that if the dinge in the tin caused rust you’d have to be careful. Micksie was Maeve’s husband, Mr Gilfoyle was his father. Diamond Street was where they lived, where Maeve ruled the small household and most of the time was unable to hide the fact that she resented its composition. Capable and brisk of manner, a tall, dark-haired childless woman, Maeve considered that she’d been caught: when their mother had died there had been only she to look after Justina, their mother being widowed for as long as either of them could remember. And Maeve had been caught again when her father-in-law, miserable with the ailments of old age, had to be taken in; and again in not realizing before her marriage that Micksie had to be kept out of the pubs. ‘Oh, I have children all right,’ was how she often put it when there was sympathy for her childlessness.
Justina bought an ice-cream in the Today Tonight shop. The evening papers had just come off the Dublin bus. No-vote a Winner, the headline said and she wondered what that meant. People she knew were gathering items from the shelves, minerals in bottles and tins, frozen food from the central refrigerator, magazines from the racks. She walked about, licking at her ice-cream, nibbling the edge of the cone. Up one aisle and down another, past shoe polish and disinfectant and fire-lighters, carton soups reduced, everything handy in case you’d forgotten to get it in Superquinn.
‘You’re a great girl,’ one of two nuns remarked, reaching out for Kerrygold and dropping it into her wire basket. Older and more severe, the other nun didn’t say anything.
‘Ah, I’m not,’ Justina said. She held out her ice-cream, but neither nun licked it. ‘No way I’m great,’ Justina said.
*
‘What kept you?’ Maeve asked in the kitchen.
‘Mrs Scally was on about the peaches. Sister Agnes and Sister Lull were in the Today Tonight.’
‘What’d you go in there for?’
‘Nothing.’
Justina paused for an instant and then she told about the ice-cream and Maeve knew it was because her sister had suddenly considered it would be a lie to hold that back.
‘God, will you look at the cut of you!’ She shouted, furious, unable to help herself. ‘Aren’t there jobs to do here without you’re streeling about the town?’
‘I had to make my confession.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’
‘What’s up, Maeve?’
Maeve shook her head. She could feel a weariness in her eyes which made her want to close them, and then felt it spreading through her body. She returned to what she’d been doing before Justina came in, slicing cooked potatoes.
‘Lay the table,’ she said. ‘Take your anorak off and lay the table.’
‘I got a letter from Breda,’ Justina said.
She had closed the back door behind her but hadn’t come further into the kitchen. She had a way of doing that, just as she had a way of standing by the sink, not getting on with what she was there for, as if she’d forgotten everything. All their lives, for as long as Maeve could remember, she had been irritated by this shortcoming in her sister, as she was by Justina’s bringing back messages from the shopkeepers to say this or that commodity had come in or that there was a new bargain line, as she was by the telephone calls that came from a farmer nearly six miles from the town to say that Justina was again feeding his bullocks bunches of grass. Not that he objected, the man always said, only the bullocks could be frisky and maybe crowd her.
‘Will you read me Breda’s letter, Maeve?’
‘You keep away from that one, d’you hear me?’
‘Sure, Breda’s gone.’
‘And she’ll stay where she is.’
‘Will I lay the table, Maeve?’
‘Didn’t I ask you to?’
‘I’ll lay it so.’
*
Father Clohessy walked in the opposite direction from the one taken by Justina. The sense of loss that had possessed him when she left the church had given way to a more general feeling of deprivation that, these days, he was not often without. The grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been. He had seen his congregations fall off and struggled against the feeling that he’d been deserted. Confusion spread from the mores of the times into the Church itself; in combating it, he prayed for guidance but was not heard.
A familiar melancholy, not revealed in his manner, accompanied Father Clohessy in the minutes it took him to reach the limestone figure of the rebel leader in the square that was the centre of the town. That he considered it necessary to keep private his concern about the plight of his Church did nothing to lighten the burden of his mood, any more than the temporary absence from the parish of Father Finaghy did. At present undergoing a period of treatment after a car accident, Father Finaghy was extrovert and gregarious, a priest who carried his faith on to the golf-course, where it was never a hindrance. ‘Arrah, sure we do our best,’ Father Finaghy was given to remarking. Father Clohessy missed his companionship; almost a protection it seemed like sometimes.