‘Have you change, Father?’ a young woman begged from a doorway, a baby asleep in a shawl beside her. ‘A few coppers at all today?’
She said she’d pray for him and he thanked her, finding the coins she hoped for. He knew her; she was usually there. He might have asked her when he’d see her at Mass, but he didn’t bother.
Music blared across the small square from Mulvany’s Electrical and TV, giving way to the careless whine of Bob Dylan. Mulvany had established for himself a tradition of celebrating the birthdays of popular entertainers by playing a tribute: today Bob Dylan was sixty. Although one song only was played on these occasions, and no more than once during the day it related to, Father Clohessy considered it a disturbance in a quiet town and had once approached Mulvany about it. But Mulvany had argued that it was nostalgic for the older citizens to hear the likes of Perry Como or Dolly Parton coming out of the blue at them, and exciting for the youngsters to have the new arrivals on the music scene honoured. That a priest’s protest had been so summarily dismissed was par for the course, an expression often used by Father Finaghy in his own unprotesting acceptance of the decline of clerical influence. The times they were a-changing, Bob Dylan’s reminder was repeated yet again before there was silence from Mulvany’s loudspeakers.
‘Isn’t that a grand day, Father?’ a woman remarked to him and he agreed that it was and she said thank God for it. He wondered if she knew, if any of them knew, that when he preached he was angry because he didn’t know what to say to them, that he searched for ways to disguise his distress, stumbling about from word to word. ‘How’s Father Finaghy?’ the woman asked him. ‘Have you heard, Father?’
He told her. Father Finaghy was making good progress; he’d heard that morning.
‘Wouldn’t it be the prayers said for him?’ the woman suggested, and he agreed with that, too, before he resumed his journey through the town to where he and Father Finaghy lodged.
His tea was ready for him there. Comeraghview, called after the mountains in the faraway distance, was a grey detached house with a handkerchief tree in a front garden protected from the main road by grey iron railings. It was he and Father Finaghy who had decided that the presbytery could be put to better use, who with their bishop’s permission, and in the end with his blessing, had given it over to become the youth centre the town had long been in need of.
‘I have ham and a salad for you,’ Father Clohessy’s landlady said, placing this food in front of him.
*
‘I will of course,’ Mr Gilfoyle said when Justina asked him to read Breda Maguire’s letter to her. ‘Have you it there?’
Justina had, and Mr Gilfoyle suggested that they’d take it out the back where they’d be private. His daughter-in-law went ballistic at any mention of Breda Maguire these days, never mind having to hear of her doings in Dublin. Time was when someone who’d take her sister off her hands was a relief for Maeve, but now that the two girls were grown up and Breda Maguire had gone off the rails it was naturally different.
‘I’m living in a great joint!’ he read aloud in the small flowerless back garden that had become a depository for the abandoned wash-basins and lavatory bowls and perforated ballcocks that his son had replaced in his work as a plumber. Nettles had grown up around cast-iron heating radiators and a bath; dandelions and docks flourished. Mr Gilfoyle had cleared a corner, where he kept a chair from the kitchen; on sunny mornings he read the newspaper there.
He was a moustached man, grey-haired, once burly and on the stout side, less so now, since time had established in him the varying characteristics of advancing years. His pronounced stoop, an arthritic shoulder, trouble with gallstones, fingers distorted by Dupuytren’s Disease had made another man of him. In his day he, too, had been a plumber.
‘The kind of house you wouldn’t know about,’ he read out, imagining what was described: a place where theatre people lived, coffee always on the go, late mornings. Mr Gilfoyle found it hard to believe that Breda Maguire had been given accommodation there, but he supposed it could be true.
Justina, sitting on the edge of the bath, had no such difficulty. She accepted without demur all that was related. She saw her friend in the green-and-blue kimono that was described. ‘Like a dragon wrapped round me,’ Mr Gilfoyle had read out and explained that a kimono was Japanese. He felt what he believed to be a gallstone changing position inside him somewhere, a twitch of pain that was only to be expected at his age he’d been told by the doctor he visited regularly.
‘Davy Byrne’s you’d never see only it’s jammed to the doors. The racing crowd, all that kind of thing.’ Breda Maguire was on the streets, Mr Gilfoyle said to himself. She had money, you could tell she had, nothing made up about that. The house she said she was stopping in was out Islandbridge way and again there was an echo of the truth in that, handy for the quays. The quays were where you’d find them, a bricklayer told him once, maybe fifty years ago, and it could still be where a man would go to look for a street woman. ‘I have a friend takes me out,’ he read. ‘Billy.’
‘Will you listen to that!’ Justina whispered. The name of a hotel where there were dances was mentioned, shops, cinemas. A wrist bangle had been bought, and Justina saw her friend and Billy at a counter with a glass top like the one in Hennessy’s the Clock Shop, necklaces and bangles laid out for them. She saw them in a café, a waitress bringing grills, the same as Justina had seen people eating in Egan’s, a chop and chips, bacon, egg and sausage. Billy was like the air pilot in the film she and Breda had watched on the television only the day before Breda went off. ‘How’s tricks with yourself ?’ Mr Gilfoyle’s voice continued.
It would be impossible for Justina to respond to that because her learning difficulty deprived her of any communication that involved writing words down. But Breda had remembered, as naturally she would. ‘I’ll maybe give you a call one of these days,’ Mr Gilfoyle read out. The pain had shifted, had gone round to the back, like a gallstone maybe would.
‘Isn’t Billy great, the way he’d give her things?’ Justina said.
‘He is, Justina.’
‘Isn’t Billy a great name?’
‘It is.’
Covering a multitude of sins, Mr Gilfoyle assumed, a stand-in name for names Breda didn’t know, the presents another way of putting it that money had changed hands in some quayside doorway.
‘I’ll dream about Breda and Billy,’ Justina said, slipping down from the edge of the bath.
*
Father Clohessy listened when Justina put it into her confession that Maeve was cross with her because Breda telephoned. She put it into her confession that she went into the kitchen to tell what Breda had said and Maeve wouldn’t listen; and the next thing was she let drop a cup she was drying. It was then that Maeve began to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, down her neck into the collar of her dress. As if it wasn’t nuisance enough, an old man who didn’t know how to make his bed forever on about his ailments. As if it wasn’t enough, Micksie in and out of the pubs, a girl with learning trouble, the back garden a tip. Was there a woman in Ireland could put up with more, when on top of everything a hooer the like of Breda Maguire got going again after they thought they’d seen the back of her?
All that Justina put into her confession. She was bad, she said. One minute she was laughing with Breda on the phone; the next, Maeve was crying in the kitchen. Breda said come up to Dublin and they’d have great gas. Get the money however, Breda said. Get it off Mr Gilfoyle, anything at all. Take the half-two bus, the same as she’d got herself. Come up for the two days, what harm would it do anyone? ‘I’ll show you the whole works,’ Breda said.