Collected Stories

Autumn Sunshine

The rectory was in County Wexford, eight miles from Enniscorthy. It was a handsome eighteenth-century house, with Virginia creeper covering three sides and a tangled garden full of buddleia and struggling japonica which had always been too much for its incumbents. It stood alone, seeming lonely even, approximately at the centre of the country parish it served. Its church – St Michael’s Church of Ireland – was two miles away, in the village of Boharbawn.

For twenty-six years the Morans had lived there, not wishing to live anywhere else. Canon Moran had never been an ambitious man; his wife, Frances, had found contentment easy to attain in her lifetime. Their four girls had been born in the rectory, and had become a happy family there. They were grown up now, Frances’s death was still recent: like the rectory itself, its remaining occupant was alone in the countryside. The death had occurred in the spring of the year, and the summer had somehow been bearable. The clergyman’s eldest daughter had spent May and part of June at the rectory with her children. Another one had brought her family for most of August, and a third was to bring her newly married husband in the winter. At Christmas nearly all of them would gather at the rectory and some would come at Easter. But that September, as the days drew in, the season was melancholy.

Then, one Tuesday morning, Slattery brought a letter from Canon Moran’s youngest daughter. There were two other letters as well, in unsealed buff envelopes which meant that they were either bills or receipts. Frail and grey-haired in his elderliness, Canon Moran had been wondering if he should give the lawn in front of the house a last cut when he heard the approach of Slattery’s van. The lawn-mower was the kind that had to be pushed, and in the spring the job was always easier if the grass had been cropped close at the end of the previous summer.

‘Isn’t that a great bit of weather, Canon?’ Slattery remarked, winding down the window of the van and passing out the three envelopes. ‘We’re set for a while, would you say?’

‘I hope so, certainly.’

‘Ah, we surely are, sir.’

The conversation continued for a few moments longer, as it did whenever Slattery came to the rectory. The postman was young and easy-going, not long the successor to old Mr O’Brien, who’d been making the round on a bicycle when the Morans first came to the rectory in 1952. Mr O’Brien used to talk about his garden; Slattery talked about fishing, and often brought a share of his catch to the rectory.

‘It’s a great time of year for it,’ he said now, ‘except for the darkness coming in.’

Canon Moran smiled and nodded; the van turned round on the gravel, dust rising behind it as it moved swiftly down the avenue to the road. Everyone said Slattery drove too fast.

He carried the letters to a wooden seat on the edge of the lawn he’d been wondering about cutting. Deirdre’s handwriting hadn’t changed since she’d been a child; it was round and neat, not at all a reflection of the girl she was. The blue English stamp, the Queen in profile blotched a bit by the London postmark, wasn’t on its side or half upside down, as you might possibly expect with Deirdre. Of all the Moran children, she’d grown up to be the only difficult one. She hadn’t come to the funeral and hadn’t written about her mother’s death. She hadn’t been to the rectory for three years.

I’m sorry, she wrote now. I couldn’t stop crying actually. I’ve never known anyone as nice or as generous as she was. For ages I didn’t even want to believe she was dead. I went on imagining her in the rectory and doing the flowers in church and shopping in Enniscorthy.

Deirdre was twenty-one now. He and Frances had hoped she’d go to Trinity and settle down, but although at school she’d seemed to be the cleverest of their children she’d had no desire to become a student. She’d taken the Rosslare boat to Fishguard one night, having said she was going to spend a week with her friend Maeve Coles in Cork. They hadn’t known she’d gone to England until they received a picture postcard from London telling them not to worry, saying she’d found work in an egg-packing factory.

Well, I’m coming back for a little while now, she wrote, if you could put up with me and if you wouldn’t find it too much. I’ll cross over to Rosslare on the 29th, the morning crossing, and then I’ll come on to Enniscorthy on the bus. I don’t know what time it will be but there’s a pub just by where the bus drops you so could we meet in the small bar there at six o’clock and then I won’t have to lug my cases too far? I hope you wont mind going into such a place. If you can’t make it, or don’t want to see me, it’s understandable, so if you don’t turn up by half six I’ll see if I can get a bus on up to Dublin. Only I need to get back to Ireland for a while.

It was, as he and Slattery had agreed, a lovely autumn. Gentle sunshine mellowed the old garden, casting an extra sheen of gold on leaves that were gold already. Roses that had been ebullient in June and July bloomed modestly now. Michaelmas daisies were just beginning to bud. Already the crab-apples were falling, hydrangeas had a forgotten look. Canon Moran carried the letter from his daughter into the walled vegetable garden and leaned against the side of the greenhouse, half sitting on a protruding ledge, reading the letter again. Panes of glass were broken in the greenhouse, white paint and putty needed to be renewed, but inside a vine still thrived, and was heavy now with black ripe fruit. Later that morning he would pick some and drive into Enniscorthy, to sell the grapes to Mrs Neary in Slaney Street.

Love, Deirdre: the letter was marvellous. Beyond the rectory the fields of wheat had been harvested, and the remaining stubble had the same tinge of gold in the autumn light; the beech trees and the chestnuts were triumphantly magnificent. But decay and rotting were only weeks away, and the letter from Deirdre was full of life. ‘Love, Deirdre’ were words more beautiful than all the season’s glories. He prayed as he leaned against the sunny greenhouse, thanking God for this salvation.

For all the years of their marriage Frances had been a help. As a younger man, Canon Moran hadn’t known quite what to do. He’d been at a loss among his parishioners, hesitating in the face of this weakness or that: the pregnancy of Alice Pratt in 1954, the argument about grazing rights between Mr Willoughby and Eugene Dunlevy in 1960, the theft of an altar cloth from St Michael’s and reports that Mrs Tobin had been seen wearing it as a skirt. Alice Pratt had been going out with a Catholic boy, one of Father Gowan’s flock, which made the matter more difficult than ever. Eugene Dunlevy was one of Father Gowan’s also, and so was Mrs Tobin.

‘Father Gowan and I had a chat,’ Frances had said, and she’d had a chat as well with Alice Pratt’s mother. A month later Alice Pratt married the Catholic boy, but to this day attended St Michael’s every Sunday, the children going to Father Gowan. Mrs Tobin was given Hail Marys to say by the priest; Mr Willoughby agreed that his father had years ago granted Eugene Dunlevy the grazing rights. Everything, in these cases and in many others, had come out all right in the end: order emerged from the confusion that Canon Moran so disliked, and it was Frances who had always begun the process, though no one ever said in the rectory that she understood the mystery of people as well as he understood the teachings of the New Testament. She’d been a freckle-faced girl when he’d married her, pretty in her way. He was the one with the brains.

Frances had seen human frailty everywhere: it was weakness in people, she said, that made them what they were as much as strength did. And she herself had her own share of such frailty, falling short in all sorts of ways of the God’s image her husband preached about. With the small amount of housekeeping money she could be allowed she was a spendthrift, and she said she was lazy. She loved clothes and often overreached herself on visits to Dublin; she sat in the sun while the rectory gathered dust and the garden became rank; it was only where people were concerned that she was practical. But for what she was her husband had loved her with unobtrusive passion for fifty years, appreciating her conversation and the help she’d given him because she could so easily sense the truth. When he’d found her dead in the garden one morning he’d felt he had lost some part of himself.

Though many months had passed since then, the trouble was that Frances hadn’t yet become a ghost. Her being alive was still too recent, the shock of her death too raw. He couldn’t distance himself; the past refused to be the past. Often he thought that her fingerprints were still in the rectory, and when he picked the grapes or cut the grass of the lawn it was impossible not to pause and remember other years. Autumn had been her favourite time.

‘Of course I’d come,’ he said. ‘Of course, dear. Of course.’

‘I haven’t treated you very well.’

‘It’s over and done with, Deirdre.’

She smiled, and it was nice to see her smile again, although it was strange to be sitting in the back bar of a public house in Enniscorthy. He saw her looking at him, her eyes passing over his clerical collar and black clothes, and his quiet face. He could feel her thinking that he had aged, and putting it down to the death of the wife he’d been so fond of.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t write,’ she said.

‘You explained in your letter, Deirdre.’

‘It was ages before I knew about it. That was an old address you wrote to.’

‘I guessed.’

In turn he examined her. Years ago she’d had her long hair cut. It was short now, like a black cap on her head. And her face had lost its chubbiness; hollows where her cheeks had been made her eyes more dominant, pools of seaweed green. He remembered her child’s stocky body, and the uneasy adolescence that had spoilt the family’s serenity. Her voice had lost its Irish intonation.

‘I’d have met you off the boat, you know.’

‘I didn’t want to bother you with that.’

‘Oh, now, it isn’t far, Deirdre.’

She drank Irish whiskey, and smoked a brand of cigarettes called Three Castles. He’d asked for a mineral himself, and the woman serving them had brought him a bottle of something that looked like water but which fizzed up when she’d poured it. A kind of lemonade he imagined it was, and didn’t much care for it.

‘I have grapes for Mrs Neary,’ he said.

‘Who’s that?’

‘She has a shop in Slaney Street. We always sold her the grapes. You remember?’

She didn’t, and he reminded her of the vine in the greenhouse. A shop surely wouldn’t be open at this hour of the evening, she said, forgetting that in a country town of course it would be. She asked if the cinema was still the same in Enniscorthy, a cement building halfway up a hill. She said she remembered bicycling home from it at night with her sisters, not being able to keep up with them. She asked after her sisters and he told her about the two marriages that had taken place since she’d left: she had in-laws she’d never met, and nephews and a niece.

They left the bar, and he drove his dusty black Vauxhall straight to the small shop he’d spoken of. She remained in the car while he carried into the shop two large chip-baskets full of grapes. Afterwards Mrs Neary came to the door with him.

‘Well, is that Deirdre?’ she said as Deirdre wound down the window of the car. ‘I’d never know you, Deirdre.’

‘She’s come back for a little while,’ Canon Moran explained, raising his voice a little because he was walking round the car to the driver’s seat as he spoke.

‘Well, isn’t that grand?’ said Mrs Neary.

Everyone in Enniscorthy knew Deirdre had just gone off, but it didn’t matter now. Mrs Neary’s husband, who was a red-cheeked man with a cap, much smaller than his wife, appeared beside her in the shop doorway. He inclined his head in greeting, and Deirdre smiled and waved at both of them. Canon Moran thought it was pleasant when she went on waving while he drove off.

In the rectory he lay wakeful that night, his mind excited by Deirdre’s presence. He would have loved Frances to know, and guessed that she probably did. He fell asleep at half past two and dreamed that he and Frances were young again, that Deirdre was still a baby. The freckles on Frances’s face were out in profusion, for they were sitting in the sunshine in the garden, tea things spread about them, the children playing some game among the shrubs. It was autumn then also, the last of the September heat. But because he was younger in his dream he didn’t feel part of the season himself, or sense its melancholy.

A week went by. The time passed slowly because a lot was happening, or so it seemed. Deirdre insisted on cooking all the meals and on doing the shopping in Boharbawn’s single shop or in Enniscorthy. She still smoked her endless cigarettes, but the peakiness there had been in her face when she’d first arrived wasn’t quite so pronounced – or perhaps, he thought, he’d become used to it. She told him about the different jobs she’d had in London and the different places she’d lived in, because on the postcards she’d occasionally sent there hadn’t been room to go into detail. In the rectory they had always hoped she’d managed to get a training of some sort, though guessing she hadn’t. In fact, her jobs had been of the most rudimentary kind: as well as her spell in the egg-packing factory, there’d been a factory that made plastic earphones, a cleaning job in a hotel near Euston, and a year working for the Use-Us Office Cleansing Service. ‘But you can’t have liked any of that work, Deirdre?’ he suggested, and she agreed she hadn’t.

From the way she spoke he felt that that period of her life Was over: adolescence was done with, she had steadied and taken stock. He didn’t suggest to her that any of this might be so, not wishing to seem either too anxious or too pleased, but he felt she had returned to the rectory in a very different frame of mind from the one in which she’d left it. He imagined she would remain for quite a while, still taking stock, and in a sense occupying her mother’s place. He thought he recognized in her a loneliness that matched his own, and he wondered if it was a feeling that their loneliness might be shared which had brought her back at this particular time. Sitting in the drawing-room while she cooked or washed up, or gathering grapes in the greenhouse while she did the shopping, he warmed delightedly to this theme. It seemed like an act of God that their circumstances should interlace this autumn. By Christmas she would know what she wanted to do with her life, and in the spring that followed she would perhaps be ready to set forth again. A year would have passed since the death of Frances.

‘I have a friend,’ Deirdre said when they were having a cup of coffee together in the middle of one morning. ‘Someone who’s been good to me.’

She had carried a tray to where he was composing next week’s sermon, sitting on the wooden seat by the lawn at the front of the house. He laid aside his exercise book, and a pencil and a rubber. ‘Who’s that?’ he inquired.

‘Someone called Harold.’

He nodded, stirring sugar into his coffee.

‘I want to tell you about Harold, Father. I want you to meet him.’

‘Yes, of course.’

She lit a cigarette. She said, ‘We have a lot in common. I mean, he’s the only person…’

She faltered and then hesitated. She lifted her cigarette to her lips and drew on it.

He said, ‘Are you fond of him, Deirdre?’

‘Yes, I am.’

Another silence gathered. She smoked and drank her coffee. He added more sugar to his.

‘Of course I’d like to meet him,’ he said.

‘Could he come to stay with us, Father? Would you mind? Would it be all right?’

‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. I’d be delighted.’

Harold was summoned, and arrived at Rosslare a few days later. In the meantime Deirdre had explained to her father that her friend was an electrician by trade and had let it fall that he was an intellectual kind of person. She borrowed the old Vauxhall and drove it to Rosslare to meet him, returning to the rectory in the early evening.

‘How d’you do?’ Canon Moran said, stretching out a hand in the direction of an angular youth with a birthmark on his face. His dark hair was cut very short, cropped almost. He was wearing a black leather jacket.

‘I’m fine,’ Harold said.

‘You’ve had a good journey?’

‘Lousy,’ smatter of fact, Mr Moran.’

Harold’s voice was strongly Cockney, and Canon Moran wondered if Deirdre had perhaps picked up some of her English vowel sounds from it. But then he realized that most people in London would speak like that, as people did on the television and the wireless. It was just a little surprising that Harold and Deirdre should have so much in common, as they clearly had from the affectionate way they held one another’s hand. None of the other Moran girls had gone in so much for holding hands in front of the family.

He was to sit in the drawing-room, they insisted, while they made supper in the kitchen, so he picked up the Irish Times and did as he was bidden. Half an hour later Harold appeared and said that the meal was ready: fried eggs and sausages and bacon, and some tinned beans. Canon Moran said grace.

Having stated that County Wexford looked great, Harold didn’t say much else. He didn’t smile much, either. His afflicted face bore an edgy look, as if he’d never become wholly reconciled to his birthmark. It was like a scarlet map on his left cheek, a shape that reminded Canon Moran of the toe of Italy. Poor fellow, he thought. And yet a birthmark was so much less to bear than other afflictions there could be.

‘Harold’s fascinated actually,’ Deirdre said, ‘by Ireland.’

Her friend didn’t add anything to that remark for a moment, even though Canon Moran smiled and nodded interestedly. Eventually Harold said, ‘The struggle of the Irish people.’

‘I didn’t know a thing about Irish history,’ Deirdre said. ‘I mean, not anything that made sense.’

The conversation lapsed at this point, leaving Canon Moran greatly puzzled. He began to say that Irish history had always been of considerable interest to him also, that it had a good story to it, its tragedy uncomplicated. But the other two didn’t appear to understand what he was talking about and so he changed the subject. It was a particularly splendid autumn, he pointed out.

‘Harold doesn’t go in for anything like that,’ Deirdre replied.

During the days that followed Harold began to talk more, surprising Canon Moran with almost everything he said. Deirdre had been right to say he was fascinated by Ireland, and it wasn’t just a tourist’s fascination. Harold had read widely: he spoke of ancient battles, and of the plantations of James I and Elizabeth, of Robert Emmet and the Mitchelstown martyrs, of Pearse and de Valera. ‘The struggle of the Irish people’ was the expression he most regularly employed. It seemed to Canon Moran that the relationship between Harold and Deirdre had a lot to do with Harold’s fascination, as though his interest in Deirdre’s native land had somehow caused him to become interested in Deirdre herself.

There was something else as well. Fascinated by Ireland, Harold hated his own country. A sneer whispered through his voice when he spoke of England: a degenerate place, he called it, destroyed by class-consciousness and the unjust distribution of wealth. He described in detail the city of Nottingham, to which he appeared to have a particular aversion. He spoke of unnecessary motorways and the stupidity of bureaucracy, the stifling presence of a Royal family. ‘You could keep an Indian village,’ he claimed, ‘on what those corgis eat. You could house five hundred homeless in Buckingham Palace.’ There was brainwashing by television and the newspaper barons. No ordinary person had a chance because pap was fed to the ordinary person, a deliberate policy going back into Victorian times when education and religion had been geared to the enslavement of minds. The English people had brought it on themselves, having lost their spunk, settling instead for consumer durables. ‘What better can you expect,’ Harold demanded, ‘after the hypocrisy of that empire the bosses ran?’

Deirdre didn’t appear to find anything specious in this line of talk, which surprised her father. ‘Oh, I wonder about that,’ he said himself from time to time, but he said it mildly, not wishing to cause an argument, and in any case his interjections were not acknowledged. Quite a few of the criticisms Harold levelled at his own country could be levelled at Ireland also and, Canon Moran guessed, at many countries throughout the world. It was strange that the two neighbouring islands had been so picked out, although once Germany was mentioned and the point made that developments beneath the surface there were a hopeful sign, that a big upset was on the way.

‘We’re taking a walk,’ Harold said one afternoon. ‘She’s going to show me Kinsella’s Barn.’

Canon Moran nodded, saying to himself that he disliked Harold. It was the first time he had admitted it, but the feeling was familiar. The less generous side of his nature had always emerged when his daughters brought to the rectory the men they’d become friendly with or even proposed to marry. Emma, the eldest girl, had brought several before settling in the end for Thomas. Linda had brought only John, already engaged to him. Una had married Carley not long after the death, and Carley had not yet visited the rectory: Canon Moran had met him in Dublin, where the wedding had taken place, for in the circumstances Una had not been married from home. Carley was an older man, an importer of tea and wine, stout and flushed, certainly not someone Canon Moran would have chosen for his second-youngest daughter. But, then, he had thought the same about Emma’s Thomas and about Linda’s John.

Thomas was a farmer, sharing a sizeable acreage with his father in Co. Meath. He always brought to mind the sarcasm of an old schoolmaster who in Canon Moran’s distant schooldays used to refer to a gang of boys at the back of the classroom as ‘farmers’ sons’, meaning that not much could be expected of them. It was an inaccurate assumption but even now, whenever Canon Moran found himself in the company of Thomas, he couldn’t help recalling it. Thomas was mostly silent, with a good-natured smile that came slowly and lingered too long. According to his father, and there was no reason to doubt the claim, he was a good judge of beef cattle.

Linda’s John was the opposite. Wiry and suave, he was making his way in the Bank of Ireland, at present stationed in Waterford. He had a tiny orange-coloured moustache and was good at golf. Linda’s ambition for him was that he should become the Bank of Ireland’s manager in Limerick or Galway, where the insurances that went with the position were particularly lucrative. Unlike Thomas, John talked all the time, telling jokes and stories about the Bank of Ireland’s customers.

‘Nothing is perfect,’ Frances used to say, chiding her husband for an uncharitableness he did his best to combat. He disliked being so particular about the men his daughters chose, and he was aware that other people saw them differently: Thomas would do anything for you, John was fun, the middle-aged Carley laid his success at Una’s feet. But whoever the husbands of his daughters had been, Canon Moran knew he’d have felt the same. He was jealous of the husbands because ever since his daughters had been born he had loved them unstintingly. When he had prayed after Frances’s death he’d felt jealous of God, who had taken her from him.

‘There’s nothing much to see,’ he pointed out when Harold announced that Deirdre was going to show him Kinsella’s Barn. ‘Just the ruin of a wall is all that’s left.’

‘Harold’s interested, Father.’

They set off on their walk, leaving the old clergyman ashamed that he could not like Harold more. It wasn’t just his griminess: there was something sinister about Harold, something furtive about the way he looked at you, peering at you cruelly out of his afflicted face, not meeting your eye. Why was he so fascinated about a country that wasn’t his own? Why did he refer so often to ‘Ireland’s struggle’ as if that struggle particularly concerned him? He hated walking, he had said, yet he’d just set out to walk six miles through woods and fields to examine a ruined wall.

Canon Moran had wondered as suspiciously about Thomas and John and Carley, privately questioning every statement they made, finding hidden motives everywhere. He’d hated the thought of his daughters being embraced or even touched, and had forced himself not to think about that. He’d prayed, ashamed of himself then, too. ‘It’s just a frailty in you,’ Frances had said, her favourite way of cutting things down to size.

He sat for a while in the afternoon sunshine, letting all of it hang in his mind. It would be nice if they quarrelled on their walk. It would be nice if they didn’t speak when they returned, if Harold simply went away. But that wouldn’t happen, because they had come to the rectory with a purpose. He didn’t know why he thought that, but he knew it was true: they had come for a reason, something that was all tied up with Harold’s fascination and with the kind of person Harold was, with his cold eyes and his afflicted face.

In March 1798 an incident had taken place in Kinsella’s Barn, which at that time had just been a barn. Twelve men and women, accused of harbouring insurgents, had been tied together with ropes at the command of a Sergeant James. They had been led through the village of Boharbawn, the Sergeant’s soldiers on horseback on either side of the procession, the Sergeant himself bringing up the rear. Designed as an act of education, an example to the inhabitants of Boharbawn and the country people around, the twelve had been herded into a barn owned by a farmer called Kinsella and there burned to death. Kinsella, who had played no part either in the harbouring of insurgents or in the execution of the twelve, was afterwards murdered by his own farm labourers.

‘Sergeant James was a Nottingham man,’ Harold said that evening at supper. ‘A soldier of fortune who didn’t care what he did. Did you know he acquired great wealth, Mr Moran?’

‘No, I wasn’t at all aware of that,’ Canon Moran replied.

‘Harold found out about him,’ Deirdre said.

‘He used to boast he was responsible for the death of a thousand Irish people. It was in Boharbawn he reached the thousand. They rewarded him well for that.’

‘Not much is known about Sergeant James locally. Just the legend of Kinsella’s Barn.’

‘No way it’s a legend.’

Deirdre nodded; Canon Moran did not say anything. They were eating cooked ham and salad. On the table there was a cake which Deirdre had bought in McGovern’s in Enniscorthy, and a pot of tea. There were several bunches of grapes from the greenhouse, and a plate of wafer biscuits. Harold was fond of salad cream, Canon Moran had noticed; he had a way of hitting the base of the jar with his hand, causing large dollops to spurt all over his ham. He didn’t place his knife and fork together on the plate when he’d finished, but just left them anyhow. His fingernails were edged with black.

‘You’d feel sick,’ he was saying now, working the salad cream again. ‘You’d stand there looking at that wall and you’d feel a revulsion in your stomach.’

‘What I meant,’ Canon Moran said, ‘is that it has passed into local legend. No one doubts it took place; there’s no question about that. But two centuries have almost passed.’

‘And nothing has changed,’ Harold interjected. ‘The Irish people still share their bondage with the twelve in Kinsella’s Barn.’

‘Round here of course –’

‘It’s not round here that matters, Mr Moran. The struggle’s world-wide; the sickness is everywhere actually.’

Again Deirdre nodded. She was like a zombie, her father thought. She was being used because she was an Irish girl; she was Harold’s Irish connection, and in some almost frightening way she believed herself in love with him. Frances had once said they’d made a mistake with her. She had wondered if Deirdre had perhaps found all the love they’d offered her too much to bear. They were quite old when Deirdre was a child, the last expression of their own love. She was special because of that.

‘At least Kinsella got his chips,’ Harold pursued, his voice relentless. ‘At least that’s something.’

Canon Moran protested. The owner of the barn had been an innocent man, he pointed out. The barn had simply been a convenient one, large enough for the purpose, with heavy stones near it that could be piled up against the door before the conflagration. Kinsella, that day, had been miles away, ditching a field.

‘It’s too long ago to say where he was,’ Harold retorted swiftly. ‘And if he was keeping a low profile in a ditch it would have been by arrangement with the imperial forces.’

When Harold said that, there occurred in Canon Moran’s mind a flash of what appeared to be the simple truth. Harold was an Englishman who had espoused a cause because it was one through which the status quo in his own country might be damaged. Similar such Englishmen, read about in newspapers, stirred in the clergyman’s mind: men from Ealing and Liverpool and Wolverhampton who had changed their names to Irish names, who had even learned the Irish language, in order to ingratiate themselves with the new Irish revolutionaries. Such men dealt out death and chaos, announcing that their conscience insisted on it.

‘Well, we’d better wash the dishes,’ Deirdre said, and Harold rose obediently to help her.

The walk to Kinsella’s Barn had taken place on a Saturday afternoon. The following morning Canon Moran conducted his services in St Michael’s, addressing his small Protestant congregation, twelve at Holy Communion, eighteen at morning service. He had prepared a sermon about repentance, taking as his text St Luke, 15:32:… for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. But at the last moment he changed his mind and spoke instead of the incident in Kinsella’s Barn nearly two centuries ago. He tried to make the point that one horror should not fuel another, that passing time contained its own forgiveness. Deirdre and Harold were naturally not in the church, but they’d been present at breakfast, Harold frying eggs on the kitchen stove, Deirdre pouring tea. He had looked at them and tried to think of them as two young people on holiday. He had tried to tell himself they’d come to the rectory for a rest and for his blessing, that he should be grateful instead of fanciful. It was for his blessing that Emma had brought Thomas to the rectory, that Linda had brought John. Una would bring Carley in November. ‘Now, don’t be silly,’ Frances would have said.

‘The man Kinsella was innocent of everything,’ he heard his voice insisting in his church. ‘He should never have been murdered also.’

Harold would have delighted in the vengeance exacted on an innocent man. Harold wanted to inflict pain, to cause suffering and destruction. The end justified the means for Harold, even if the end was an artificial one, a pettiness grandly dressed up. In his sermon Canon Moran spoke of such matters without mentioning Harold’s name. He spoke of how evil drained people of their humour and compassion, how people pretended even to themselves. It was worse than Frances’s death, he thought as his voice Continued in the church: it was worse that Deirdre should be part of wickedness.

He could tell that his parishioners found his sermon odd, and he didn’t blame them. He was confused, and naturally distressed. In the rectory Deirdre and Harold would be waiting for him. They would all sit down to Sunday lunch while plans for atrocities filled Harold’s mind, while Deirdre loved him.

‘Are you well again, Mrs Davis?’ he inquired at the church door of a woman who suffered from asthma.

‘Not too bad, Canon. Not too bad, thank you.’

He spoke to all the others, inquiring about health, remarking on the beautiful autumn. They were farmers mostly and displayed a farmer’s gratitude for the satisfactory season. He wondered suddenly who’d replace him among them when he retired or died. Father Gowan had had to give up a year ago. The young man, Father White, was always in a hurry.

‘Goodbye so, Canon,’ Mr Willoughby said, shaking hands as he always did, every Sunday. It was a long time since there’d been the trouble about Eugene Dunlevy’s grazing rights; three years ago Mr Willoughby had been left a widower himself. ‘You’re managing all right, Canon?’ he asked, as he also always did.

‘Yes, I’m all right, thank you, Mr Willoughby.’

Someone else inquired if Deirdre was still at the rectory, and he said she was. Heads nodded, the unspoken thought being that that was nice for him, his youngest daughter at home again after all these years. There was forgiveness in several faces, forgiveness of Deirdre, who had been thoughtless to go off to an egg-packing factory. There was the feeling, also unexpressed, that the young were a bit like that.

‘Goodbye,’ he said in a general way. Car doors banged, engines started. In the vestry he removed his surplice and his cassock and hung them in a cupboard.

‘We’ll probably go tomorrow,’ Deirdre said during lunch.

‘Go?’

‘We’ll probably take the Dublin bus.’

‘I’d like to see Dublin,’ Harold said.

‘And then you’re returning to London?’

‘We’re easy about that,’ Harold interjected before Deirdre could reply. ‘I’m a tradesman, Mr Moran, an electrician.’

‘I know you’re an electrician, Harold.’

‘What I mean is, I’m on my own; I’m not answerable to the bosses. There’s always a bob or two waiting in London.’

For some reason Canon Moran felt that Harold was lying. There was a quickness about the way he’d said they were easy about their plans, and it didn’t seem quite to make sense, the logic of not being answerable to bosses and a bob or two always waiting for him. Harold was being evasive about their movements, hiding the fact that they would probably remain in Dublin for longer than he implied, meeting other people like himself.

‘It was good of you to have us,’ Deirdre said that evening, all three of them sitting around the fire in the drawing-room because the evenings had just begun to get chilly. Harold was reading a book about Che Guevara and hadn’t spoken for several hours. ‘We’ve enjoyed it, Father.’

‘It’s been nice having you, Deirdre.’

‘I’ll write to you from London.’

It was safe to say that: he knew she wouldn’t because she hadn’t before, until she’d wanted something. She wouldn’t write to thank him for the rectory’s hospitality, and that would be quite in keeping. Harold was the same kind of man as Sergeant James had been: it didn’t matter that they were on different sides. Sergeant James had maybe borne an affliction also, a humped back or a withered arm. He had ravaged a country that existed then for its spoils, and his most celebrated crime was neatly at hand so that another Englishman could make matters worse by attempting to make amends. In Harold’s view the trouble had always been that these acts of war and murder died beneath the weight of print in history books, and were forgotten. But history could be rewritten, and for that Kinsella’s Barn was an inspiration: Harold had journeyed to it as people make journeys to holy places.

‘Yes?’ Deirdre said, for while these reflections had passed through his mind he had spoken her name, wanting to ask her to tell him the truth about her friend.

He shook his head. ‘I wish you could have seen your mother again,’ he said instead. ‘I wish she were here now.’

The faces of his three sons-in-law irrelevantly appeared in his mind: Carley’s flushed cheeks, Thomas’s slow good-natured smile, John’s little moustache. It astonished him that he’d ever felt suspicious of their natures, for they would never let his daughters down. But Deirdre had turned her back on the rectory, and what could be expected when she came back with a man? She had never been like Emma or Linda or Una, none of whom smoked Three Castles cigarettes and wore clothes that didn’t seem quite clean. It was impossible to imagine any of them becoming involved with a revolutionary, a man who wanted to commit atrocities.

‘He was just a farmer, you know,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Kinsella.’

Surprise showed in Deirdre’s face. ‘It was Mother we were talking about,’ she reminded him, and he could see her trying to connect her mother with a farmer who had died two hundred years ago, and not beirig able to. Elderliness, he could see her thinking. ‘Only time he wandered,’ she would probably say to her friend.

‘It was good of you to come, Deirdre.’

He looked at her, far into her eyes, admitting to himself that she had always been his favourite. When the other girls were busily growing up she had still wanted to sit on his knee. She’d had a way of interrupting him no matter what he was doing, arriving beside him with a book she wanted him to read to her.

‘Goodbye, Father,’ she said the next morning while they waited in Enniscorthy for the Dublin bus. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Yeah, thanks a ton, Mr Moran,’ Harold said.

‘Goodbye, Harold. Goodbye, my dear.’

He watched them finding their seats when the bus arrived and then he drove the old Vauxhall back to Boharbawn, meeting Slattery in his postman’s van and returning his salute. There was shopping he should have done, meat and potatoes, and tins of things to keep him going. But his mind was full of Harold’s afflicted face and his black-rimmed fingernails, and Deirdre’s hand in his. And then flames burst from the straw that had been packed around living people in Kinsella’s Barn. They burned through the wood of the barn itself, revealing the writhing bodies. On his horse the man called Sergeant James laughed.

Canon Moran drove the car into the rectory’s ramshackle garage, and walked around the house to the wooden seat on the front lawn. Frances should come now with two cups of coffee, appearing at the front door with the tray and then crossing the gravel and the lawn. He saw her as she had been when first they came to the rectory, when only Emma had been born; but the grey-haired Frances was somehow there as well, shadowing her youth. ‘Funny little Deirdre,’ she said, placing the tray on the seat between them.

It seemed to him that everything that had just happened in the rectory had to do with Frances, with meeting her for the first time when she was eighteen, with loving her and marrying her. He knew it was a trick of the autumn sunshine that again she crossed the gravel and the lawn, no more than pretence that she handed him a cup and saucer. ‘Harold’s just a talker,’ she said. ‘Not at all like Sergeant James.’

He sat for a while longer on the wooden seat, clinging to these words, knowing they were true. Of course it was cowardice that ran through Harold, inspiring the whisper of his sneer when he spoke of the England he hated so. In the presence of a befuddled girl and an old Irish clergyman England was an easy target, and Ireland’s troubles a kind of target also.

Frances laughed, and for the first time her death seemed far away, as her life did too. In the rectory the visitors had blurred her fingerprints to nothing, and had made of her a ghost that could come back. The sunshine warmed him as he sat there, the garden was less melancholy than it had been.