Collected Stories

Death in Jerusalem

‘Till then,’ Father Paul said, leaning out of the train window. ‘Till Jerusalem, Francis.’

‘Please God, Paul.’ As he spoke the Dublin train began to move and his brother waved from the window and he waved back, a modest figure on the platform. Everyone said Francis might have been a priest as well, meaning that Francis’s quietness and meditative disposition had an air of the cloister about them. But Francis contented himself with the running of Conary’s hardware business, which his mother had run until she was too old for it. ‘Are we game for the Holy Land next year?’ Father Paul had asked that July. ‘Will we go together, Francis?’ He had brushed aside all Francis’s protestations, all attempts to explain that the shop could not be left, that their mother would be confused by the absence of Francis from the house. Rumbustiously he’d pointed out that there was their sister Kitty, who was in charge of the household of which Francis and their mother were part and whose husband, Myles, could surely be trusted to look after the shop for a single fortnight. For thirty years, ever since he was seven, Francis had wanted to go to the Holy Land. He had savings which he’d never spent a penny of: you couldn’t take them with you, Father Paul had more than once stated that July.

On the platform Francis watched until the train could no longer, be seen, his thoughts still with his brother. The priest’s ruddy countenance smiled again behind cigarette smoke; his bulk remained impressive in his clerical clothes, the collar pinching the flesh of his neck, his black shoes scrupulously polished. There were freckles on the backs of his large, Strong hands; he had a fine head of hair, grey and crinkly. In an hour and a half’s time the train would creep into Dublin, and he’d take a taxi. He’d spend a night in the Gresham Hotel, probably falling in with another priest, having a drink or two, maybe playing a game of bridge after his meal. That was his brother’s way and always had been – an extravagant, easy kind of way, full of smiles and good humour. It was what had taken him to America and made him successful there. In order to raise money for the church that he and Father Steigmuller intended to build before 1980 he took parties of the well-to-do from San Francisco to Rome and Florence, to Chartres and Seville and the Holy Land. He was good at raising money, not just for the church but for the boys’ home of which he was president, and for the Hospital of Our Saviour, and for St. Mary’s Old People’s Home on the west side of the city. But every July he flew back to Ireland, to the town in Co. Tipperary where his mother and brother and sister still lived. He stayed in the house above the shop which he might have inherited himself on the death of his father, which he’d rejected in favour of the religious life. Mrs Conary was eighty now. In the shop she sat silently behind the counter, in a corner by the chicken-wire, wearing only clothes that were black. In the evenings she sat with Francis in the lace-curtained sitting-room, while the rest of the family occupied the kitchen. It was for her sake most of all that Father Paul made the journey every summer, considering it his duty.

Walking back to the town from the station, Francis was aware that he was missing his brother. Father Paul was fourteen years older and in childhood had often taken the place of their father, who had died when Francis was five. His brother had possessed an envied strength and knowledge; he’d been a hero, quite often worshipped, an example of success. In later life he had become an example of generosity as well: ten years ago he’d taken their mother to Rome, and their sister Kitty and her husband two years later; he’d paid the expenses when their sister Edna had gone to Canada; he’d assisted two nephews to make a start in America. In childhood Francis hadn’t possessed his brother’s healthy freckled face, just as in middle age he didn’t have his ruddy complexion and his stoutness and his easiness with people. Francis was slight, his sandy hair receding, his face rather pale. His breathing was sometimes laboured because of wheeziness in the chest. In the ironmonger’s shop he wore a brown cotton coat.

‘Hullo, Mr Conary,’ a woman said to him in the main street of the town. ‘Father Paul’s gone off, has he?’

‘Yes, he’s gone again.’

‘I’ll pray for his journey so,’ the woman promised, and Francis thanked her.

A year went by. In San Francisco another wing of the boys’ home was completed, another target was reached in Father Paul and Father Steigmuller’s fund for the church they planned to have built by 1980. In the town in Co. Tipperary there were baptisms and burial services and First Communions. Old Loughlin, a farmer from Bansha, died in McSharry’s grocery and bar, having gone there to celebrate a good price he’d got for a heifer. Clancy, from behind the counter in Doran’s drapery, married Maureen Talbot; Mr Nolan’s plasterer married Miss Carron; Johneen Meagher married Seamus in the chip-shop, under pressure from her family to do so. A local horse, from the stables on the Limerick road, was said to be an entry for the Fairy house Grand National, but it turned out not to be true. Every evening of that year Francis sat with his mother in the lace-curtained sitting-room above the shop. Every weekday she sat in her corner by the chicken-wire, watching while he counted out screws and weighed staples, or advised about yard brushes or tap-washers. Occasionally, on a Saturday, he visited the three Christian Brothers who lodged with Mrs Shea and afterwards he’d tell his mother about how the authority was slipping these days from the nuns and the Christian Brothers, and how Mrs Shea’s elderly maid, Ita, couldn’t see to cook the food any more. His mother would nod and hardly ever speak. When he told a joke – what young Hogan had said when he’d found a nail in his egg or how Ita had put mint sauce into a jug with milk in it – she never laughed, and looked at him in surprise when he laughed himself. But Dr Foran said it was best to keep her cheered up.

All during that year Francis talked to her about his forthcoming visit to the Holy Land, endeavouring to make her understand that for a fortnight next spring he would be away from the house and the shop. He’d been away before for odd days, but that was when she’d been younger. He used to visit an aunt in Tralee, but three years ago the aunt had died and he hadn’t left the town since.

Francis and his mother had always been close. Before his birth two daughters had died in infancy, and his very survival had often struck Mrs Conary as a gift. He had always been her favourite, the one among her children whom she often considered least able to stand on his own two feet. It was just like Paul to have gone blustering off to San Francisco instead of remaining in Co. Tipperary. It was just like Kitty to have married a useless man. ‘There’s not a girl in the town who’d touch him,’ she’d said to her daughter at the time, but Kitty had been headstrong and adamant, and there was My les now, doing nothing whatsoever except cleaning other people’s windows for a pittance and placing bets in Donovan’s the turf accountant’s. It was the shop and the arrangement Kitty had with Francis and her mother that kept her and the children going, three of whom had already left the town, which in Mrs Conary’s opinion they mightn’t have done if they’d had a better type of father. Mrs Conary often wondered what her own two babies who’d died might have grown up into, and imagined they might have been like Francis, about whom she’d never had a moment’s worry. Not in a million years would he give you the feeling that he was too big for his boots, like Paul sometimes did with his lavishness and his big talk of America. He wasn’t silly like Kitty, or so sinful you couldn’t forgive him, the way you couldn’t forgive Edna, even though she was dead and buried in Toronto.

Francis understood how his mother felt about the family. She’d had a hard life, left a widow early on, trying to do the best she could for everyone. In turn he did his best to compensate for the struggles and disappointments she’d suffered, cheering her in the evenings while Kitty and Myles and the youngest of their children watched the television in the kitchen. His mother had ignored the existence of Myles for ten years, ever since the day he’d taken money out of the till to pick up the odds on Gusty Spirit at Phoenix Park. And although Francis got on well enough with Myles he quite understood that there should be a long aftermath to that day. There’d been a terrible row in the kitchen, Kitty screaming at Myles and Myles telling lies and Francis trying to keep them calm, saying they’d give the old woman a heart attack.

She didn’t like upsets of any kind, so all during the year before he was to visit the Holy Land Francis read the New Testament to her in order to prepare her. He talked to her about Bethlehem and Nazareth and the miracle of the loaves and fishes and all the other miracles. She kept nodding, but he often wondered if she didn’t assume he was just casually referring to episodes in the Bible. As a child he had listened to such talk himself, with awe and fascination, imagining the walking on the water and the temptation in the wilderness. He had imagined the cross carried to Calvary, and the rock rolled back from the tomb, and the rising from the dead on the third day. That he was now to walk in such places seemed extraordinary to him, and he wished his mother was younger so that she could appreciate his good fortune and share it with him when she received the postcards he intended, every day, to send her. But her eyes seemed always to tell him that he was making a mistake, that somehow he was making a fool of himself by doing such a showy thing as going to the Holy Land. I have the entire itinerary mapped out, his brother wrote from San Francisco. There’s nothing we’ll miss.

It was the first time Francis had been in an aeroplane. He flew by Aer Lingus from Dublin to London and then changed to an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. He was nervous and he found it exhausting. All the time he seemed to be eating, and it was strange being among so many people he didn’t know. ‘You will taste honey such as never before,’ an Israeli businessman in the seat next to his assured him. ‘And Galilean figs. Make certain to taste Galilean figs.’ Make certain too, the businessman went on, to experience Jerusalem by night and in the early dawn. He urged Francis to see places he had never heard of, Yad Va-Shem, the treasures of the Shrine of the Book. He urged him to honour the martyrs of Masada and to learn a few words of Hebrew as a token of respect. He told him of a shop where he could buy mementoes and warned him against Arab street traders.

‘The hard man, how are you?’ Father Paul said at Tel Aviv airport, having flown in from San Francisco the day before. Father Paul had had a drink or two and he suggested another when they arrived at the Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem. It was half past nine in the evening. ‘A quick little nightcap,’ Father Paul insisted, ‘and then hop into bed with you, Francis.’ They sat in an enormous open lounge with low, round tables and square modern armchairs. Father Paul said it was the bar.

They had said what had to be said in the car from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Father Paul had asked about their mother, and Kitty and Myles. He’d asked about other people in the town, old Canon Mahon and Sergeant Murray. He and Father Steigmuller had had a great year of it, he reported: as well as everything else, the boys’ home had turned out two tip-top footballers. ‘We’ll start on a tour at half-nine in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll be sitting having breakfast at eight.’

Francis went to bed and Father Paul ordered another whisky, with ice. To his great disappointment there was no Irish whiskey in the hotel so he’d had to content himself with Haig. He fell into conversation with an American couple, making them promise that if they were ever in Ireland they wouldn’t miss out Co. Tipperary. At eleven o’clock the barman said he was wanted at the reception desk and when Father Paul went there and announced himself he was given a message in an envelope. It was a telegram that had come, the girl said in poor English. Then she shook her head, saying it was a telex. He opened the envelope and learnt that Mrs Conary had died.

Francis fell asleep immediately and dreamed that he was a boy again, out fishing with a friend whom he couldn’t now identify.

On the telephone Father Paul ordered whisky and ice to be brought to his room. Before drinking it he took his jacket off and knelt by his bed to pray for his mother’s salvation. When he’d completed the prayers he walked slowly up and down the length of the room, occasionally sipping at his whisky. He argued with himself and finally arrived at a decision.

For breakfast they had scrambled eggs that looked like yellow ice-cream, and orange juice that was delicious. Francis wondered about bacon, but Father Paul explained that bacon was not readily available in Israel.

‘Did you sleep all right?’ Father Paul inquired. ‘Did you have the jet-lag?’

‘Jet-lag?’

‘A tiredness you get after jet flights. It’d knock you out for days.’

‘Ah, I slept great, Paul.’

‘Good man.’

They lingered over breakfast. Father Paul reported a little more of what had happened in his parish during the year, in particular about the two young footballers from the boys’ home. Francis told about the decline in the cooking at Mrs Shea’s boarding-house, as related to him by the three Christian Brothers. ‘I have a car laid on,’ Father Paul said, and twenty minutes later they walked out into the Jerusalem sunshine.

The hired car stopped on the way to the walls of the Old City. It drew into a lay-by at Father Paul’s request and the two men got out and looked across a wide valley dotted with houses and olive trees. A road curled along the distant slope opposite. ‘The Mount of Olives,’ Father Paul said. ‘And that’s the road to Jericho.’ He pointed more particularly. ‘You see that group of eight big olives? Just off the road, where the church is?’

Francis thought he did, but was not sure. There were so many olive trees, and more than one church. He glanced at his brother’s pointing finger and followed its direction with his glance.

‘The Garden of Gethsemane,’ Father Paul said.

Francis did not say anything. He continued to gaze at the distant church, with the clump of olive trees beside it. Wild flowers were profuse on the slopes of the valley, smears of orange and blue on land that looked poor. Two Arab women herded goats.

‘Could we see it closer?’ he asked, and his brother said that definitely they would. They returned to the waiting car and Father Paul ordered it to the Gate of St Stephen.

Tourists heavy with cameras thronged the Via Dolorosa. Brown, barefoot children asked for alms. Stall-keepers pressed their different wares: cotton dresses, metal-ware, mementoes, sacred goods. ‘Get out of the way,’ Father Paul kept saying to them, genially laughing to show he wasn’t being abrupt. Francis wanted to stand still and close his eyes, to visualize for a moment the carrying of the Cross. But the ceremony of the Stations, familiar to him for as long as he could remember, was unreal. Try as he would, Christ’s journey refused to enter his imagination, and his own plain church seemed closer to the heart of the matter than the noisy lane he was now being jostled on. ‘God damn it, of course it’s genuine,’ an angry American voice proclaimed, in reply to a shriller voice which insisted that cheating had taken place. The voices argued about a piece of wood, neat beneath plastic in a little box, a sample or not of the Cross that had been carried.

They arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and at the Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross, where they prayed. They passed through the Chapel of the Angel, to the tomb of Christ. Nobody spoke in the marble cell, but when they left the church Francis overheard a quiet man with spectacles saying it was unlikely that a body would have been buried within the walls of the city. They walked to Hezekiah’s Pool and out of the Old City at the Jaffa Gate, where their hired car was waiting for them. ‘Are you peckish?’ Father Paul asked, and although Francis said he wasn’t they returned to the hotel.

Delay funeral till Monday was the telegram Father Paul had sent. There was an early flight on Sunday, in time for an afternoon one from London to Dublin. With luck there’d be a late train on Sunday evening and if there wasn’t they’d have to fix a car. Today was Tuesday. It would give them four and a half days. Funeral eleven Monday the telegram at the reception desk now confirmed. ‘Ah, isn’t that great?’ he said to himself, bundling the telegram up.

‘Will we have a small one?’ he suggested in the open area that was the bar. ‘Or better still a big one.’ He laughed. He was in good spirits in spite of the death that had taken place. He gestured at the barman, wagging his head and smiling jovially.

His face had reddened in the morning sun; there were specks of sweat on his forehead and his nose. ‘Bethlehem this afternoon,’ he laid down. ‘Unless the jet-lag…?’

‘I haven’t got the jet-lag.’

In the Nativity Boutique Francis bought for his mother a small metal plate with a fish on it. He had stood for a moment, scarcely able to believe it, on the spot where the manger had been, in the Church of the Nativity. As in the Via Dolorosa it had been difficult to clear his mind of the surroundings that now were present: the exotic Greek Orthodox trappings, the foreign-looking priests, the oriental smell. Gold, frankincense and myrrh, he’d kept thinking, for somehow the church seemed more the church of the kings than of Joseph and Mary and their child. Afterwards they returned to Jerusalem, to the Tomb of the Virgin and the Garden of Gethsemane. ‘It could have been anywhere,’ he heard the quiet, bespectacled sceptic remarking in Gethsemane. ‘They’re only guessing.’

Father Paul rested in the late afternoon, lying down on his bed with his jacket off. He slept from half past five until a quarter past seven and awoke refreshed. He picked up the telephone and asked for whisky and ice to be brought up and when it arrived he undressed and had a bath, relaxing in the warm water with the drink on a ledge in the tiled wall beside him. There would be time to take in Nazareth and Galilee. He was particularly keen that his brother should see Galilee because Galilee had atmosphere and was beautiful. There wasn’t, in his own opinion, very much to Nazareth but it would be a pity to miss it all the same. It was at the Sea of Galilee that he intended to tell his brother of their mother’s death.

We’ve had a great day, Francis wrote on a postcard that showed an aerial view of Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Our Lord’s tomb is, and Gethsemane and Bethlehem. Paul’s in great form. He addressed it to his mother, and then wrote other cards, to Kitty and Myles and to the three Christian Brothers in Mrs Shea’s, and to Canon Mahon. He gave thanks that he was privileged to be in Jerusalem. He read St Mark and some of St Matthew. He said his rosary.

‘Will we chance the wine?’ Father Paul said at dinner, not that wine was something he went in for, but a waiter had come up and put a large padded wine-list into his hand.

‘Ah, no, no,’ Francis protested, but already Father Paul was running his eye down the listed bottles.

‘Have you local wine?’ he inquired of the waiter. ‘A nice red one?’

The waiter nodded and hurried away, and Francis hoped he wouldn’t get drunk, the red wine on top of the whisky he’d had in the bar before the meal. He’d only had the one whisky, not being much used to it, making it last through his brother’s three.

‘I heard some gurriers in the bar,’ Father Paul said, ‘making a great song and dance about the local red wine.’

Wine made Francis think of the Holy Communion, but he didn’t say so. He said the soup was delicious and he drew his brother’s attention to the custom there was in the hotel of a porter ringing a bell and walking about with a person’s name chalked on a little blackboard on the end of a rod.

‘It’s a way of paging you,’ Father Paul explained, ‘Isn’t it nicer than bellowing out some fellow’s name?’ He smiled his easy smile, his eyes beginning to water as a result of the few drinks he’d had. He was beginning to feel the strain: he kept thinking of their mother lying there, of what she’d say if she knew what he’d done, how she’d savagely upbraid him for keeping the fact from Francis. Out of duty and humanity he had returned each year to see her because, after all, you only had the one mother. But he had never cared for her.

Francis went for à walk after dinner. There were young soldiers with what seemed to be toy guns on the streets, but he knew the guns were real. In the shop windows there were television sets for sale, and furniture and clothes, just like anywhere else. There were advertisements for some film or other, two writhing women without a stitch on them, the kind of thing you wouldn’t see in Co. Tipperary. ‘You want something, sir?’ a girl said, smiling at him with broken front teeth. The siren of a police car or an ambulance shrilled urgently near by. He shook his head at the girl. ‘No, I don’t want anything,’ he said, and then realized what she had meant. She was small and very dark, no more than a child. He hurried on, praying for her.

When he returned to the hotel he found his brother in the lounge with other people, two men and two women. Father Paul was ordering a round of drinks and called out to the barman to bring another whisky. ‘Ah, no, no,’ Francis protested, anxious to go to his room and to think about the day, to read the New Testament and perhaps to write a few more postcards. Music was playing, coming from speakers that could not be seen.

‘My brother Francis,’ Father Paul said to the people he was with, and the people all gave their names, adding that they came from New York. ‘I was telling them about Tipp,’ Father Paul said to his brother, offering his packet of cigarettes around.

‘You like Jerusalem, Francis?’ one of the American women asked him, and he replied that he hadn’t been able to take it in yet. Then, feeling that didn’t sound enthusiastic enough, he added that being there was the experience of a lifetime.

Father Paul went on talking about Co. Tipperary and then spoke of his parish in San Francisco, the boys’ home and the two promising footballers, the plans for the new church. The Americans listened and in a moment the conversation drifted on to the subject of their travels in England, their visit to Istanbul and Athens, an argument they’d had with the Customs at Tel Aviv. ‘Well, I think I’ll hit the hay,’ one of the men announced eventually, standing up.

The others stood up too and so did Francis. Father Paul remained where he was, gesturing again in the direction of the barman. ‘Sit down for a nightcap,’ he urged his brother.

‘Ah, no, no –’ Francis began.

‘Bring us two more of those,’ the priest ordered with a sudden abruptness, and the barman hurried away. ‘Listen,’ said Father Paul. ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

After dinner, while Francis had been out on his walk, before he’d dropped into conversation with the Americans, Father Paul had said to himself that he couldn’t stand the strain. It was the old woman stretched out above the hardware shop, as stiff as a board already, with the little lights burning in her room: he kept seeing all that, as if she wanted him to, as if she was trying to haunt him. Nice as the idea was, he didn’t think he could continue with what he’d planned, with waiting until they got up to Galilee.

Francis didn’t want to drink any more. He hadn’t wanted the whisky his brother had ordered him earlier, nor the one the Americans had ordered for him. He didn’t want the one that the barman now brought. He thought he’d just leave it there, hoping his brother wouldn’t see it. He lifted the glass to his lips, but he managed not to drink any.

‘A bad thing has happened,’ Father Paul said.

‘Bad? How d’you mean, Paul?’

‘Are you ready for it?’ He paused. Then he said, ‘She died.’

Francis didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t know who was meant to be dead, or why his brother was behaving in an odd manner. He didn’t like to think it but he had to: his brother wasn’t fully sober.

‘Our mother died,’ Father Paul said. ‘I’m after getting a telegram.’

The huge area that was the lounge of the Plaza Hotel, the endless tables and people sitting at them, the swiftly moving waiters and barmen, seemed suddenly a dream. Francis had a feeling that he was not where he appeared to be, that he wasn’t sitting with his brother, who was wiping his lips with a handkerchief. For a moment he appeared in his confusion to be struggling his way up the Via Dolorosa again, and then in the Nativity Boutique.

‘Take it easy, boy,’ his brother was saying. ‘Take a mouthful of whisky.’

Francis didn’t obey that injunction. He asked his brother to repeat what he had said, and Father Paul repeated that their mother had died.

Francis closed his eyes and tried as well to shut away the sounds around them. He prayed for the salvation of his mother’s soul. ‘Blessed Virgin, intercede,’ his own voice said in his mind. ‘Dear Mary, let her few small sins be forgiven.’

Having rid himself of his secret, Father Paul felt instant relief. With the best of intentions, it had been a foolish idea to think he could maintain the secret until they arrived in a place that was perhaps the most suitable in the world to hear about the death of a person who’d been close to you. He took a gulp of his whisky and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief again. He watched his brother, waiting for his eyes to open.

‘When did it happen?’ Francis asked eventually.

‘Yesterday.’

‘And the telegram only came –’

‘It came last night, Francis. I wanted to save you the pain.’

‘Save me? How could you save me? I sent her a postcard, Paul.’

‘Listen to me, Francis –’

‘How could you save me the pain?’

‘I wanted to tell you when we got up to Galilee.’

Again Francis felt he was caught in the middle of a dream. He couldn’t understand his brother: he couldn’t understand what he meant by saying a telegram had come last night, why at a moment like this he was talking about Galilee. He didn’t know why he was sitting in this noisy place when he should be back in Ireland.

‘I fixed the funeral for Monday,’ Father Paul said.

Francis nodded, not grasping the significance of this arrangement. ‘We’ll be back there this time tomorrow,’ he said.

‘No need for that, Francis, Sunday morning’s time enough.’

‘But she’s dead –’

‘We’ll be there in time for the funeral.’

‘We can’t stay here if she’s dead.’

It was this, Father Paul realized, he’d been afraid of when he’d argued with himself and made his plan. If he had knocked on Francis’s door the night before, Francis would have wanted to return immediately without seeing a single stone of the land he had come so far to be moved by.

‘We could go straight up to Galilee in the morning,’ Father Paul said quietly. ‘You’ll find comfort in Galilee, Francis.’

But Francis shook his head. ‘I want to be with her,’ he said.

Father Paul lit another cigarette. He nodded at a hovering waiter, indicating his need of another drink. He said to himself that he must keep his cool, an expression he was fond of.

‘Take it easy, Francis,’ he said.

‘Is there a plane out in the morning? Can we make arrangements now?’ He looked about him as if for a member of the hotel staff who might be helpful.

‘No good’ll be done by tearing off home, Francis. What’s wrong with Sunday?’

‘I want to be with her.’

Anger swelled within Father Paul. If he began to argue his words would become slurred: he knew that from experience. He must keep his cool and speak slowly and clearly, making a few simple points. It was typical of her, he thought, to die inconveniently.

‘You’ve come all this way,’ he said as slowly as he could without sounding peculiar. ‘Why cut it any shorter than we need? We’ll be losing a week anyway. She wouldn’t want us to go back.’

‘I think she would.’

He was right in that. Her possessiveness in her lifetime would have reached out across a dozen continents for Francis. She’d known what she was doing by dying when she had.

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ Francis said. ‘She didn’t want me to come.’

‘You’re thirty-seven years of age, Francis.’

‘I did wrong to come.’

‘You did no such thing.’

The time he’d taken her to Rome she’d been difficult for the whole week, complaining about the food, saying everywhere was dirty. Whenever he’d spent anything she’d disapproved. All his life, Father Paul felt, he’d done his best for her. He had told her before anyone else when he’d decided to enter the priesthood, certain that she’d be pleased. ‘I thought you’d take over the shop,’ she’d said instead.

‘What difference could it make to wait, Francis?’

‘There’s nothing to wait for.’

As long as he lived Francis knew he would never forgive himself. As long as he lived he would say to himself that he hadn’t been able to wait a few years, until she’d passed quietly on. He might even have been in the room with her when it happened.

‘It was a terrible thing not to tell me,’ he said. ‘I sat down and wrote her a postcard, Paul. I bought her a plate.’

‘So you said.’

‘You’re drinking too much of that whisky.’

‘Now, Francis, don’t be silly.’

‘You’re half drunk and she’s lying there.’

‘She can’t be brought back no matter what we do.’

‘She never hurt anyone,’ Francis said.

Father Paul didn’t deny that, although it wasn’t true. She had hurt their sister Kitty, constantly reproaching her for marrying the man she had, long after Kitty was aware she’d made a mistake. She’d driven Edna to Canada after Edna, still unmarried, had had a miscarriage that only the family knew about. She had made a shadow out of Francis although Francis didn’t know it. Failing to hold on to her other children, she had grasped her youngest to her, as if she had borne him to destroy him.

‘It’ll be you who’ll say a Mass for her?’ Francis said.

‘Yes, of course it will.’

‘You should have told me.’

Francis realized why, all day, he’d been disappointed. From the moment when the hired car had pulled into the lay-by and his brother had pointed across the valley at the Garden of Gethsemane he’d been disappointed and had not admitted it. He’d been disappointed in the Via Dolorosa and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and in Bethlehem. He remembered the bespectacled man who’d kept saying that you couldn’t be sure about anything. All the people with cameras made it impossible to think, all the jostling and pushing was distracting. When he’d said there’d been too much to take in he’d meant something different.

‘Her death got in the way,’ he said.

‘What d’you mean, Francis?’

‘It didn’t feel like Jerusalem, it didn’t feel like Bethlehem.’

‘But it is, Francis, it is.’

‘There are soldiers with guns all over the place. And a girl came up to me on the street. There was that man with a bit of the Cross. There’s you, drinking and smoking in this place –’

‘Now, listen to me, Francis –’

‘Nazareth would be a disappointment. And the Sea of Galilee. And the Church of the Loaves and Fishes.’ His voice had risen. He lowered it again. ‘I couldn’t believe in the Stations this morning. I couldn’t see it happening the way I do at home.’

‘That’s nothing to do with her death, Francis. You’ve got a bit of jet-lag, you’ll settle yourself up in Galilee. There’s an atmosphere in Galilee that nobody misses.’

‘I’m not going near Galilee.’ He struck the surface of the table, and Father Paul told him to contain himself. People turned their heads, aware that anger had erupted in the pale-faced man with the priest.

‘Quieten up,’ Father Paul commanded sharply, but Francis didn’t.

‘She knew I’d be better at home,’ he shouted, his voice shrill and reedy. ‘She knew I was making a fool of myself, a man out of a shop trying to be big –’

‘Will you keep your voice down? Of course you’re not making a fool of yourself.’

‘Will you find out about planes tomorrow morning?’

Father Paul sat for a moment longer, not saying anything, hoping his brother would say he was sorry. Naturally it was a shock, naturally he’d be emotional and feel guilty, in a moment it would be better. But it wasn’t, and Francis didn’t say he was sorry. Instead he began to weep.

‘Let’s go up to your room,’ Father Paul said, ‘and I’ll fix about the plane.’

Francis nodded but did not move. His sobbing ceased, and then he said, ‘I’ll always hate the Holy Land now.’

‘No need for that, Francis.’

But Francis felt there was and he felt he would hate, as well, the brother he had admired for as long as he could remember. In the lounge of the Plaza Hotel he felt mockery surfacing everywhere. His brother’s deceit, and the endless whisky in his brother’s glass, and his casualness after a death seemed like the scorning of a Church which honoured so steadfastly the mother of its founder. Vivid in his mind, his own mother’s eyes reminded him that they’d told him he was making a mistake, and upbraided him for not heeding her. Of course there was mockery everywhere, in the splinter of wood beneath plastic, and in the soldiers with guns that were not toys, and the writhing nakedness in the Holy City. He’d become part of it himself, sending postcards to the dead. Not speaking again to his brother, he went to his room to pray.

‘Eight a.m., sir,’ the girl at the reception desk said, and Father Paul asked that arrangements should be made to book two seats on the plane, explaining that it was an emergency, that a death had occurred. ‘It will be all right, sir,’ the girl promised.

He went slowly downstairs to the bar. He sat in a corner and lit a cigarette and ordered two whiskys and ice, as if expecting a companion. He drank them both himself and ordered more. Francis would return to Co. Tipperary and after the funeral he would take up again the life she had ordained for him. In his brown cotton coat he would serve customers with nails and hinges and wire. He would regularly go to Mass and to Confession and to Men’s Confraternity. He would sit alone in the lacecurtained sitting-room, lonely for the woman who had made him what he was, married forever to her memory.

Father Paul lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one. He continued to order whisky in two glasses. Already he could sense the hatred that Francis had earlier felt taking root in himself. He wondered if he would ever again return in July to Co. Tipperary, and imagined he would not.

At midnight he rose to make the journey to bed and found himself unsteady on his feet. People looked at him, thinking it disgraceful for a priest to be drunk in Jerusalem, with cigarette ash all over his clerical clothes.