Fools of Fortune

April 4th 1971

In the cemetery he did not see me, nor even look around for me. Have all of them been right: should I have years ago returned to Dorset, to that pretty town? Have I been nonsensical and silly, all this talk about a battlefield continuing?

Time stopped instead. The child, the priest, the faces of the aunts, the hands of the clock recording time that has no meaning. Days, hours, months, years: a jumble while I wait.

In the darkness I come downstairs, I cannot sleep. The letters we might have written would not communicate: I understand, of course I understand.

January 12th 1976

I close my eyes and I am safe again in Woodcombe Rectory. A tiredness floats away from me, and then returns.

She might be married and have children. She might, somewhere in Wiltshire or Somerset, in London or Southampton, be a doctor’s wife or an architecfs wife. She might be a doctor or an architect herself. How very strange that seems!

June 22nd 1979

Father Kilgarriff died today, no trouble in his great old age. He was right when he said that there’s not much left in a life when murder has been committed. That moment when I guessed the truth in Mr Lanigan’s office; that moment when she opened the secret drawer; that moment when he stood at his mothers bedroom door and saw her dead. After each brief moment there was as little chance for any one of us as there was for Kilneagh after the soldiers’ wrath. Truncated lives, creatures of the shadows. Fools of fortune, as his father would have said; ghosts we became.

August 6th 1982

Today he has returned.