On the night she had set aside, they came in out of the rain, smelling of the damp and their dinners: Mr and Mrs Belderboss, and Miss Bunce, the presbytery housekeeper, and her fiancé, David Hobbs. They hung up their coats in the little porch with its cracked tiles and its intractable odour of feet and gathered in our front room anxiously watching the clock on the mantelpiece, with the tea things all set out, unable to relax until Father Bernard arrived.
Eventually, the bell went and everyone got to their feet as Mummer opened the door. Father Bernard stood there with his shoulders hunched in the rain.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Mummer.
‘Thank you, Mrs Smith.’
‘Are you well, Father?’ she said. ‘You’re not too wet I hope.’
‘No, no, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard, his feet squelching inside his shoes. ‘I like the rain.’
Unsure if he was being sarcastic, Mummer’s smile wavered a little. It wasn’t a trait she knew in priests. Father Wilfred had never been anything other than deadly serious.
‘Good for the flowers,’ was all she could offer.
‘Aye,’ said Father Bernard.
He looked back at his car.
‘I wonder, Mrs Smith, how you’d feel about me bringing in Monro. He doesn’t like being on his own and the rain on the roof sends him a wee bit crackers, you know.’
‘Monro?’ said Mummer, peering past him.
‘After Matt.’
‘Matt?’
‘Matt Monro,’ said Father Bernard. ‘My one and only vice, Mrs Smith, I can assure you. I’ve had long consultations with the Lord about it, but I think he’s given me up as a lost cause.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mummer. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘The daft feller mooning at the window there.’
‘Your dog?’
‘Aye.’
‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Well, I suppose that’ll be alright. He won’t, you know, will he?’
‘Ah no, Mrs Smith, he’s well house trained. He’ll just doze off.’
‘It’ll be fine, Esther,’ said Farther and Father Bernard went out to the car and came back with a black Labrador that sneezed on the doormat and shivered and stretched out in front of the fire as if he had always lived at our house.
Mummer offered Father Bernard the single armchair next to the television, a threadbare thing somewhere between olive and beige that Mummer had tried to pretty up with a lace-edged antimacassar, aligned using Farther’s spirit level when she thought no one was looking.
He thanked her and wiped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down. Only when he was settled did everyone else do the same. Mummer clicked her fingers and shot me a look that was the equivalent of a kick up the backside. As with all social occasions at our house, it was my job to distribute the opening round of tea and biscuits, and so I knelt by the table and poured Father Bernard a cup, setting it down on top of the television which had been covered with a starched cloth — the way all the crucifixes and statues were at church now that it was Lent.
‘Thank you, Tonto,’ Father Bernard said, smiling at me conspiratorially.
It was the nickname he’d given to me when he arrived at Saint Jude’s. He was the Lone Ranger and I was Tonto. It was childish, I know, but I suppose I liked the idea of the two of us fighting side by side, like the pals in the Commando stories did. Though fighting what, I wasn’t sure. The Devil, maybe. Heathens. Gluttons. Prodigals. The kinds of people Father Wilfred had trained us to despise.
Listening to the armchair groaning under him as he tried to make himself comfortable, I was struck once again by how enormous Father Bernard was. A farmer’s son from Antrim, he was no more than thirty or so, though he looked middle-aged from years of hard graft. He had a solid, heavy face, with a nose that had been bashed flat and a roll of flesh that bulged over the back of his collar. His hair was always well groomed and oiled back over his head to form a solid helmet. But it was his hands that seemed so out of place with the chalice and the pyx. They were large and red and toughened to leather from an adolescence spent building dry stone walls and pinning down bullocks to have their ears notched. If not for the dog collar and his wool-soft voice, he could easily have passed for a doorman or a bank robber.
But, as I say, everyone at Saint Jude’s liked him straightaway. He was that sort of person. Uncomplicated, honest, easy to be with. A man to other men, fatherly to women twice his age. But I could tell that Mummer was reserving judgment. She respected him because he was a priest, of course, but only as far as he more or less replicated Father Wilfred. When he slipped up, Mummer would smile sweetly and touch him lightly on the arm.
‘Father Wilfred would normally have led the Creed in Latin, Father, but it doesn’t matter,’ she said after his first solo mass at Saint Jude’s. And, ‘Father Wilfred would normally have said grace himself,’ when he offered the slot to me over a Sunday lunch that it seemed Mummer had arranged merely to test him on such details.
We altar boys thought Father Bernard was fun — the way he gave us all nicknames and would invite us to the presbytery after Mass. We had, of course, never been asked there by Father Wilfred, and even to most of the adults in the parish it was a place of mystery almost as sacrosanct as the tabernacle. But Father Bernard seemed glad of the company, and once the silverware had been cleaned and put away and our vestments hung in the closet, he would take us across to his home and sit us around the dining table for tea and biscuits and we’d swap stories and jokes to the sound of Matt Monro. Well, I didn’t. I let the other boys do that. I preferred to listen. Or pretend to listen at least and let my eyes wander around the room and try to imagine Father Bernard’s life, what he did when no one else was around, when no one was expecting him to be a priest. I didn’t know if priests could ever knock off. I mean, Farther didn’t spend his free time checking the mortar on the chimney stack or setting up a theodolite in the back garden, so it seemed unfair that a priest should have to be holy all the time. But perhaps it didn’t work like that. Perhaps being a priest was like being a fish. Immersion for life.
***
Now that Father Bernard had been served, everyone else could have their tea. I poured out a cup for each person — finishing one pot and starting on the next — until there was one mug left. Hanny’s mug. The one with a London bus on the side. He always got a cup, even when he was away at Pinelands.
‘How is Andrew?’ Father Bernard asked, as he watched me.
‘Fine, Father,’ Mummer said.
Father Bernard nodded and pulled his face into a smile that acknowledged what she was really saying, beneath the words.
‘He’ll be back at Easter, won’t he?’ said Father Bernard.
‘Yes,’ said Mummer.
‘You’ll be glad to have him home, I’m sure.’
‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Very glad.’
There was an awkward pause. Father Bernard realised that he had strayed into private territory and changed the subject by raising his cup.
‘That’s a lovely brew, Mrs Smith,’ he said and Mummer smiled.
It wasn’t that Mummer didn’t want Hanny at home — she loved him with an intensity that made Farther and I seem like we were merely her acquaintances sometimes — but he reminded her of the test that she still hadn’t passed. And while she delighted in any little advancement Hanny seemed to have made — he might be able to write the first letter of his name, or tie a bootlace, say — they were such small progressions that it still pained her to think of the long road ahead.
‘And it will be a long road,’ Father Wilfred had once told her. ‘It will be full of disappointments and obstacles. But you should rejoice that God has chosen you to walk along it, that He has sent you Andrew as both a test and guide of your soul. He will remind you of your own muteness before God. And when at last he is able to speak, you will be able to speak, and ask of the Lord what you will. Not everyone receives such a chance, Mrs Smith. Be mindful of that.’