That took some time to explain. The small scattered community of Oscarey was a mixture now of poor and better-off: besides the remnants of the estate families, there were newcomers. Mrs Wharton—no longer alive—had been one of the latter. Her will left her house and a considerable legacy to Oscarey Church, this money to provide a stipend for a suitable incumbent, the house to become Oscarey Rectory.
‘That’s what this is about,’ Mr Flewett went on, pouring more tea.
Hester nodded. ‘I heard something like it,’ she said. ‘That perhaps a younger man…’
‘Indeed.’
Bartholomew felt uneasy. Hester often became carried away. In the sad, grimy little church he had understood how her imagination had been excited and still was; but the poverty of the place had a finality about it; even the attempts to disguise its neglect had. There was no obvious way in which the impossible could be reversed.
‘The Church of Ireland moves slowly,’ Mr Flewett said. ‘I think we can agree about that. And of course Mrs Wharton died only five months ago. But time eats away at good intentions. Her wishes must be honoured. She is buried in our little graveyard.’
‘I think we might have noticed,’ Bartholomew said.
‘Canon Furney is seventy-one. He’ll not retire and there’s no reason why he should. He’s a good, dear man and no one would want him to. What we fear, though, is that when he goes, Clonbyre and Nead will be taken in with Oscarey again and Oscarey possibly abandoned, so far away we are. But Mrs Wharton’s house would be a better rectory than the one there is now at Clonbyre, and her generosity otherwise is what the benefice is crying out for.’
‘You’ve been very kind, Mr Flewett,’ Bartholomew said. ‘It’s been interesting. But we’ve taken up your time and we mustn’t do that.’
‘Indeed you haven’t. No, not at all.’
‘I hope it all works out for you.’
‘All of us at Oscarey hope that.’
Bartholomew stood up. He held out his hand, and then Mr Flewett shook Hester’s hand too.
‘I meant it in my letter,’ he said. ‘Come any time. I’m always here. People will be pleased you came.’
Hester nodded. She had a way sometimes of not smiling and she didn’t now. But she nodded again as if to make up for that.
In the car Bartholomew said: ‘What letter?’
Hester didn’t answer. Preoccupied, she stared ahead. It was February, too soon for spring, but fine.
‘Did you write to him, Hester?’
‘The little piece in the Gazette was about that woman leaving money and the house. It gave his name.’
Bartholomew said nothing. His sister did things for the best: he’d always known that. It sometimes didn’t seem so, but he knew it was.
‘Will we have another look at the church?’ she said.
He drew in when they came to it. The hump of earth they’d noticed, the newest of the graves, was just beginning to green over and had been tended, the grass clipped in a rectangle round it.
‘I hope they know what they’re doing,’ Hester said, pushing open the heavy west door. ‘I’d keep it locked myself.’
The missionary leaflets by the collection box were smeared and dog-eared, and Bartholomew noticed now that there was bird-lime on curtains that were there instead of a door to the vestry.
‘I’d get rid of that coconut matting,’ Hester said.
They didn’t stop on the way back to Dublin. Hester was quiet, as often she was, not saying anything until they were in Maunder Street. ‘I have eggs I could scramble,’ she said then, and Bartholomew followed her through the empty rooms.
‘How long have you left here?’ he asked, and his sister said until the end of next week. There’d been a place near Fairview Park and he asked about it. No good, she said, Drumcondra the same.
‘I’m sorry you’re having difficulties. I’ve kept an eye out.’
‘The Gas Board’ll have me back. Someone they weren’t expecting to left.’
‘Well, there’s that at least.’
Hester was not enthusiastic. She didn’t say, but Bartholomew knew. In the denuded kitchen he watched while she broke the yolks of the eggs with a fork, beating them up, adding milk and butter, then sprinkling on pepper. Since their childhood he had resented, without saying it, her interference, her indignation on his behalf, her possessiveness. He had forgiven what she couldn’t help, doing so as natural in him as scorn and prickliness were in her. She had never noticed, had never been aware of how he felt.
‘You’d take to Oscarey,’ Hester said.
Before Bartholomew and his sister made their lives at Oscarey, there was an inevitability about the course of events. In private, Bartholomew did not think about what was happening in terms of Hester, considering rather that this was what had been ordained for him, that Hester’s ordering of the circumstances was part of that. Fifteen years ago, when Sally Carbery had decided against marriage at the last minute it was because she feared Hester. She had been vague when suddenly she was doubtful, and was less truthful than she might have been. Unaware of that at the time, Bartholomew was bewildered; later he came to believe that in influencing Sally Carbery’s second thoughts Hester had, then too, been assigned a role in the pattern conceived by a greater wisdom. ‘Silly’, Hester’s word for Sally Carbery had been, even before Sally Carbery and Bartholomew loved one another.
The Church approved the rescuing of Oscarey; and it was anticipated, as Mr Flewett had surmised, that when old Canon Furney died the benefice of Clonbyre, Nead and Oscarey would become one again, that the unnecessarily spacious, draughty rectory in poor repair at Clonbyre would be abandoned in favour of a smaller, more comfortable one at Oscarey. This came about, and the manner in which human existence—seeming to be shaped by the vagaries of time and chance but in fact obedient to a will—became the subject of more than one of Bartholomew’s sermons. Verses of the scriptures were called upon to lend credence to his conclusions, which more than anything else claimed that the mysterious would never be less than mysterious, would always be there, at the heart of spiritual life. That the physical presence of things, and of words and people, amounted to very little made perfect sense to Bartholomew.
It did to Hester too. Belief was part of Hester, taken for granted, a sturdy certainty that brought her confidence and allowed her to insist she must be taken as she was, allowed her to condemn as a dishonesty any concealment of personal traits. When her brother’s fourteen parishioners at Oscarey, and the twenty-seven at Clonbyre and the eleven at Nead, came to know her there was agreement—as elsewhere there had often been before—that she and Bartholomew were far from alike. None among the parishioners feared Hester as Sally Carbery had, since none possessed a fiancée’s intuition, only strangers’ perspicacity. Sally Carbery’s fear—to do with the prospect of the future, of being more closely involved with Hester—was understandable. At Oscarey, and Clonbyre and Nead, there was only Hester as she was, a talking-point because of it.
As the two aged, the understanding between them that had survived the cramped conditions of Maunder Street was supported by reminiscence—the smell of fresh bread every early morning, the unexpected death of their mother, their father’s mercilessly slow, the two cremations at Glasnevin. Seaside photographs taken at Rush and Bettystown were in an album, visits to both grandmothers and to aunts were remembered; and hearing other generations talked about were. The present was kept a little at bay: that congregations everywhere continued to dwindle, that no ground had been regained by the Church or seemed likely to be, was not often mentioned. Hester was indifferent to this. Bartholomew was increasingly a prey to melancholy, but did not let it show, to Hester or to anyone.
For her part, Hester had given herself the task of restoring Oscarey Church, scraping the tiled floor, washing the altarcloths, polishing the neglected pews and brass. The church was hers, she considered, for she had found it and brought life to it, making more of it than a mere outward and visible sign. It was not her way to say that all was well, that because of her work everything was good: there was a presumption in that she didn’t care for, and such sentiments cloyed. But as she knelt before her brother at the altar-rails, while he raised the cup or again wiped clean its rim, she knew that all this was meant to be: he was here, where he should be, and so should she, where her unyielding spirit had brought them. ‘The peace of God,’ he ended each occasion of worship, and gave his blessing. The words were special. And her brother saying them in the hush while Hester still knelt among the few who came to Oscarey Church, before the shuffling and the whispering began, was special too.