‘Breda Flynn’s who Eulala was, only a Romanian man called her that and she took it on. Limerick she came from. She was going with the Romanian. Toomey’s a Carlow man.’
‘What you’re implying is sickening and terrible and disgraceful. I’m telling you to go now.’
Father Meade knew he said that, but hardly heard it because he was wondering if he was being confused with another priest: a brain addled by recourse to methylated spirits would naturally be blurred by now. But the priests of the parish, going back for longer than the span of Prunty’s lifetime, had been well known to Father Meade. Not one of them could he consider, even for a moment, in the role Prunty was hinting at. Not a word of what was coming out of this demented imagination had ever been heard in the parish, no finger ever pointed in the direction of any priest. He’d have known, he’d have been told: of that Father Meade was certain, as sure of it as he was of his faith. ‘I have no money for you, Prunty.’
‘Long ago I’d see the young priests from the seminary. Maybe there’d be three of them walking together, out on the road to the Pass. They’d always be talking and I’d hear them and think maybe I’d enter the seminary myself. But then again you’d be cooped up. Would I come back tomorrow morning after you’d have a chance to get hold of a few shillings?’
‘I have no money for you,’ Father Meade said again.
‘There’s talk no man would want to put about. You’d forget things, Father. Long ago things would happen and you’d forget them. Sure, no one’s blaming you for that. Only one night I said to myself I’ll go back to Gleban.’
‘Do you know you’re telling lies, Prunty? Are you aware of it? Evil’s never forgotten, Prunty: of all people, a priest knows that. Little things fall away from an old man’s mind but what you’re trying to put into it would never have left it.’
‘No harm’s meant, Father.’
‘Tell your tale in Steacy’s bar, Prunty, and maybe you’ll be believed.’
Father Meade stood up and took what coins there were from his trouser pockets and made a handful of them on the desk.
‘Make your confession, Prunty. Do that at least.’
Prunty stared at the money, counting it with his eyes. Then he scooped it up. ‘If we had a few notes to go with it,’ he said, ‘we’d have the sum done right.’
He spoke slowly, as if unhurried enunciation was easier for the elderly. It was all the talk, he said, the big money there’d be. No way you could miss the talk, no way it wouldn’t affect you.
He knew he’d get more. Whatever was in the house he’d go away with, and he watched while a drawer was unlocked and opened, while money was taken from a cardboard box. None was left behind.
‘Thanks, Father,’ he said before he went.
Father Meade opened the french windows in the hope that the cigarette smoke would blow away. He’d been a smoker himself, a thirty-a-day man, but that was long ago.
‘I’m off now, Father,’ Miss Brehany said, coming in to say it, before she went home. She had cut cold meat for him, she said. She’d put the tea things out for him, beside the kettle.
‘Thanks, Rose. Thanks.’
She said goodbye and he put the chain on the hall door. In the garden he pulled the chair he’d been sitting on earlier into the last of the sun, and felt it warm on his face. He didn’t blame himself for being angry, for becoming upset because he’d been repelled by what was said to him. He didn’t blame Donal Prunty because you couldn’t blame a hopeless case. In a long life a priest had many visits, heard voices that ages ago he’d forgotten, failed to recognize faces that had been as familiar as his own. ‘See can you reach him, Father,’ Donal Prunty’s mother had pleaded when her son was still a child, and he had tried to. But Prunty had lied to him then too, promising without meaning it that he’d reform himself. ‘Ah sure, I needed a bit of money,’ he said hardly a week later when he was caught with the cancer box broken open.
Was it because he clearly still needed it, Father Meade wondered, that he’d let him go away with every penny in the house? Was it because you couldn’t but pity him? Or was there a desperation in the giving, as if it had been prompted by his own failure when he’d been asked, in greater desperation, to reach a boy who didn’t know right from wrong?
While he rested in the sun, Father Meade was aware of a temptation to let his reflections settle for one of these conclusions. But he knew, even without further thought, that there was as little truth in them as there was in the crude pretences of his visitor: there’d been no generous intent in the giving of the money, no honourable guilt had inspired the gesture, no charitable motive. He had paid for silence.
Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much of a subterfuge as any of his visitor’s. He might have belittled the petty offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland’s priesthood. He might have managed to say something decent to a Gleban man who was down and out in case it would bring consolation to the man, in case it would calm his conscience if maybe one day his conscience would nag. Instead he had been fearful, diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people.
Father Meade remained in his garden until the shadows that had lengthened on his grass and his flowerbeds were no longer there. The air turned cold. But he sat a little longer before he went back to the house to seek redemption, and to pray for Donal Prunty.
Prunty walked through the town Gleban had become since he had lived in it. He didn’t go to the church to make his confession, as he’d been advised. He didn’t go into Steacy’s bar, but passed both by, finding the way he had come in the early morning. He experienced no emotion, nor did it matter how the money had become his, only that it had. A single faint thought was that the town he left behind was again the place of his disgrace. He didn’t care. He hadn’t liked being in the town, he hadn’t liked asking where the priest lived, or going there. He hadn’t liked walking in the garden or making his demand, or even knowing that he would receive what he had come for in spite of twice being told he wouldn’t. He would drink a bit of the money away tonight and reach the ferry tomorrow. He wouldn’t hurry after that. Whatever pace he went at, the streets where he belonged would still be there.
Cheating at Canasta
It was a Sunday evening; but Sunday, Mallory remembered, had always been as any other day at Harry’s Bar. In the upstairs restaurant the waiters hurried with their loaded plates, calling out to one another above the noisy chatter. Turbot, scaloppa alla Milanese, grilled chops, scrambled eggs with bacon or smoked salmon, peas or spinaci al burro, mash done in a particularly delicious way: all were specialities here, where the waiters’ most remarkable skill was their changing of the tablecloths with a sleight of hand that was admired a hundred times a night, and even occasionally applauded. Downstairs, Americans and Italians stood three or four deep at the bar and no one heard much of what anyone else said.
Bulky without being corpulent, sunburnt, blue-eyed, with the look of a weary traveller, Mallory was an Englishman in the middle years of his life and was, tonight, alone. Four of those years had passed since he had last sat down to dinner with his wife in Harry’s Bar. ‘You promise me you’ll go back for both of us,’ Julia had pleaded when she knew she would not be returning to Venice herself, and he had promised; but more time than he’d intended had slipped by before he had done so. ‘What was it called?’ Julia had tried to remember, and he said Harry’s Bar.
The kir he’d asked for came. He ordered turbot, a Caesar salad first. He pointed at a Gavi that had not been on the wine list before. ‘Perfetto!’ the waiter approved.