Bartholomew didn’t have a parish of his own. He assisted in one on the north side of the city, where Maunder Street was too: visiting the elderly, concerned with Youth Reach and Youth Action and the running of the Youth Centre, on Saturdays taking parties of children to ramble in the Dublin mountains or to swim in one of the northside’s swimming-pools. He and Hester shared the family possessions when it was clearly no longer practical to retain the rented accommodation above the breadshop; Bartholomew found a room in the parish where he worked; Hester looked about for one. She made enquiries at the Gas Board about returning to a position similar to the one she had filled in the past, but for the moment there was nothing. Then she discovered Oscarey.
It was a townland in the Wicklow mountains, remote and bleak, once distinguished by the thriving presence of Oscarey House, of which no trace now remained. But the church that late in the house’s existence had been built on the back avenue, for the convenience of the family and its followers, was still standing; and the estate’s scattering of dwellings – the houndsman’s and its yard and kennels, the gamekeeper’s, the estate agent’s pebble-dashed house – had undergone renovation and were all occupied. There was a Spar foodstore at Oscarey crossroads, an Esso petrol pump; letters could be posted a few miles away.
Bartholomew drove his sister to Oscarey when she asked him to. They went on a Monday, which was his free day, leaving early in the morning to avoid the Dublin traffic. He didn’t know the purpose of their journey, hadn’t yet been told, but Hester quite often didn’t reveal her intentions, and he knew that eventually she would. It didn’t occur to him to make the connection he might have.
‘There’s a man called Flewett,’ Hester said in the car, reading the name from her own handwriting on a scrap of paper. ‘He’ll tell us.’
‘What, though, Hester?’
She said then – a little, not much, not everything. The small church at Oscarey that had served a purpose in the past was being talked about again. A deprived Church of Ireland community, among it the descendants of indoor servants, gardeners and estate workers, was without a convenient means of worship. A consecrated building was mouldering through disuse.
They drove through Blessington, Bartholomew’s very old A-30 van – used mainly for his Saturday trips to the mountains – making a tinny sound he hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t mention it but went on, hoping it was nothing much.
‘It came to me,’ Hester said.
‘Who’s Flewett, though?’
‘One of the people around.’
She didn’t say how she had heard about this man or offer further information about him.
‘We’ll see what Mr Flewett has to say,’ she said.
Conversation with Hester was often like that; Bartholomew was used to it. Details withheld or frugally proffered made the most of what was imparted, as if to imbue communication with greater interest. Strangers sometimes assumed this to be so, only to realize a little later that Hester was not in the least concerned with such pandering: it was simply a quirk - without a purpose – that caused her to complicate conversation in this manner. She didn’t know where it came from and did not ever wonder.
‘What d’you think?’ Bartholomew asked the man at the garage where he stopped for petrol, and the man said the tinny noise could be anything.
‘Would you rev the engine for me?’ he suggested, opening the bonnet when he’d finished at the petrol pump. ‘Give her the full throttle, sir,’ he instructed, and then, ‘D’you know what I’m going to tell you, sir? The old carburettor in this one’s a bit shook. Ease her down now, sir, till we’ll take a look.’
Bartholomew did so, then turned the engine off. As he understood it, the carburettor had loosened on its fixing. Adjusting a monkey wrench, the man said it would take two seconds to put right, and when it was done he wouldn’t charge for it, although Bartholomew pressed him to.
‘There was a line or two about Oscarey in the Gazette,’ Hester said as they drove off again, referring to the magazine that was a source of Church of Ireland news. ‘They’re managing with a recorded service.’
It was as it always had been, she was thinking, Bartholomew offering the man money when it hadn’t been asked for. The soft touch of the family, their father had called him, and used that same expression, laughing a bit, when Bartholomew first wanted to become a clergyman. But even so he hadn’t been displeased; nor had their mother, nor Hester herself. Bartholomew’s vocation suited him; it completed him, and protected him, as Hester tried to do in other ways.
‘Lucky I called in there,’ he was saying, and Hester sensed that he had guessed by now why they were driving to Oscarey. He had put it all together, which was why he referred again to the stop at the garage, for often he didn’t want to talk about what had to be talked about, hoping that whatever it was would go away of its own accord. But this was something that shouldn’t be allowed to go away, no matter how awkward and difficult it was.
‘Good of him to want to help,’ he said, and Hester watched a flight of rooks swirling out of a tree as they passed it.
‘It’s interesting, how things are,’ she said. ‘At Oscarey.’
It was still early when they arrived there, ten to eleven when Bartholomew drew up outside the Spar shop at the crossroads. ‘A Mr Flewett?’ he enquired at the single check-out, and was given directions.
He left the main road, drove slowly in a maze of lanes. Here and there there was a signpost. They found the church almost immediately after they turned into what had been the back avenue of Oscarey House, grown over now. There were graves but hardly what could be called a churchyard, no more than a narrow strip of land beside a path close to the church itself, running all the way round it. One of the graves, without a head-stone, was more recent than the others. The church was tiny, built of dark, almost black stone that gave it a forbidding air.
‘A chapel of ease it might have been,’ Bartholomew said.
‘Mr Flewett’ll know all about that.’
Inside, the church was musty, though with signs of use. The vases on the altar were empty, but there were hymn numbers – 8, 196, 516 – on the hymn board. The brass of the lectern was tarnished, and the brass of the memorial plates; the altarcloth was tattered and dingy. The slightly tinted glass of the windows – a bluish grey – did not have biblical scenes. You couldn’t call it much of a church, Bartholomew considered, but didn’t say.
‘It could be lovely,’ his sister said.
Mr Flewett was elderly, which Hester had predicted he would be. He was on his own these days, he said, bringing tea on a tray, with biscuits in a tin. He had been welcoming at the hall door, although he had examined his visitors closely before he invited them into his house.
‘We have the recording of the service, of course,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge of that myself. Morning prayer only.’
Oscarey Church was one of several in a combined benefice, the most distant being seventeen miles away. ‘Too far for Canon Furney and there are a few who can’t take to the recording so they make the journey to the canon at Clonbyre or Nead. On the other hand, of course, there’s Mrs Wharton’s kindness.’
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.