Selected Stories

Lost Ground

On the afternoon of September 14th 1989, a Thursday, Milton Leeson was addressed by a woman in his father’s upper orchard. He was surprised. If the woman had been stealing the apples she could easily have dodged out of sight around the slope of the hill when she heard his footfall. Instead, she came forward to greet him, a lean-faced woman with straight black hair that seemed too young for her wasted features. Milton had never seen her before.

Afterwards he remembered that her coat, which did not seem entirely clean, was a shade of dark blue, even black. At her throat there was a scarf of some kind. She wasn’t carrying anything. If she’d been stealing the apples she might have left whatever contained her takings behind the upper orchard’s single growth of brambles, only yards from where she stood.

The woman came close to Milton, smiling at him with her eyes and parted lips. He asked her what she wanted; he asked her what she was doing in the orchard, but she didn’t reply. In spite of her benign expression he thought for a moment she was mad and intended to attack him. Instead, the smile on her lips increased and she raised her arms as if inviting him to step into her embrace. When Milton did not do so the woman came closer still. Her hands were slender, her fingers as frail as twigs. She kissed him and then turned and walked away.

Afterwards Milton recalled very thin calves beneath the hem of her dark coat, and narrow shoulders, and the luxuriant black hair that seemed more than ever not to belong. When she’d kissed him her lips hadn’t been moist like his mother’s. They’d been dry as a bone, the touch of them so light he had scarcely felt it.

‘Well?’ Mr Leeson enquired that evening in the farmhouse kitchen.

Milton shook his head. In the upper orchard the Cox’s were always the first to ripen. Nobody expected them to be ready as soon as this, but just occasionally, after a sunny summer, the first of the crop could catch you out. Due to his encounter with the stranger, he had forgotten to see if an apple came off easily when he twisted it on the branch. But he had noticed that not many had fallen, and guessed he was safe in intimating that the crop was better left for a while yet. Shyness prevented him from reporting that there’d been a woman in the orchard; if she hadn’t come close to him, if she hadn’t touched his lips with hers, it would have been different.

Milton was not yet sixteen. He was chunky, like his father and his brothers, one of them much older, the other still a child. The good looks of the family had gone into the two girls, which Mrs Leeson privately gave thanks for, believing that otherwise neither would have married well.

‘They look laden from the lane,’ Mr Leeson said, smearing butter on half a slice of bread cut from the loaf. Mr Leeson had small eyes and a square face that gave an impression of determination. Sparse grey hair relieved the tanned dome of his head, more abundant in a closely cropped growth around his ears and the back of his neck.

‘They’re laden all right,’ Milton said.

The Leesons’ kitchen was low-ceilinged, with a flagged floor and pale blue walls. It was a rambling, rectangular room, an illusion of greater spaciousness created by the removal of the doors from two wall-cupboards on either side of a recess that for almost fifty years had held the same badly stained Esse cooker. Sink and draining-boards, with further cupboards, lined the wall opposite, beneath narrow windows. An oak table, matching the proportions of the room, dominated its centre. There was a television set on a corner shelf, to the right of the Esse. Beside the door that led to the yard a wooden settee with cushions on it, and a high-backed chair, were placed to take advantage of the heat from the Esse while viewing the television screen. Five unpainted chairs were arranged around the table, four of them now occupied by the Leesons.

Generations of the family had sat in this kitchen, ever since 1809, when a Leeson had married into a household without sons. The house, four-square and slated, with a porch that added little to its appeal, had been rebuilt in 1931, when its walls were discovered to be defective. The services of a reputable local builder being considered adequate for the modifications, no architect had been employed. Nearly sixty years later, with a ragged front garden separating it from a lane that was used mainly by the Leesons, the house still stood white and slated, no tendrils of creeper softening its spare usefulness. At the back, farm buildings with red corrugated roofs and breeze-block walls were clustered around a concrete yard; fields and orchards were on either side of the lane. For three-quarters of a mile in any direction this was Leeson territory, a tiny fraction of County Armagh. The yard was well kept, the land well tended, both reflecting the hard-working Protestant family the Leesons were.

‘There’s more, Milton.’

His mother offered him salad and another slice of cold bacon. She had fried the remains of the champ they’d had in the middle of the day: potatoes mashed with butter and spring onions now had a crispy brown crust. She dolloped a spoonful on to Milton’s plate beside the bacon and passed the plate back to him.

‘Thanks,’ Milton said, for gratitude was always expressed around this table. He watched his mother cutting up a slice of bacon for his younger brother, Stewart, who was the only other child of the family still at home. Milton’s sister Addy had married the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon a year ago; his other sister was in Leicester, married also. His brother Garfield was a butcher’s assistant in Belfast.

‘Finish it up.’ Mrs Leeson scooped the remains of the champ and spooned it on to her husband’s plate. She was a small, delicately made woman with sharp blue eyes and naturally wavy hair that retained in places the reddish-brown of her girlhood. The good looks of her daughters had once been hers also and were not yet entirely dispelled.

Having paused while the others were served – that, too, being a tradition in the family – Milton began to eat again. He liked the champ best when it was fried. You could warm it in the oven or in a saucepan, but it wasn’t the same. He liked crispness in his food – fingers of a soda farl fried, the spicy skin of a milk pudding, fried champ. His mother always remembered that. Milton sometimes thought his mother knew everything about him, and he didn’t mind: it made him fond of her that she bothered. He felt affection for her when she sat by the Esse on winter’s evenings or by the open back door in summer, sewing and darning. She never read the paper and only glanced up at the television occasionally. His father read the paper from cover to cover and never missed the television News. When Milton was younger he’d been afraid of his father, although he’d since realized that you knew where you were with him, which came from the experience of working with him in the fields and the orchards. ‘He’s fair,’ Mrs Leeson used to repeat when Milton was younger. ‘Always remember that.’

Milton was the family’s hope, now that Garfield had gone to Belfast. Questioned by his father three years ago, Garfield had revealed that if he inherited the farm and the orchards he would sell them. Garfield was urban by inclination; his ambition during his growing-up was to find his feet in Belfast and to remain there. Stewart was a mongol.

‘We’ll fix a day for the upper orchard,’ his father said. ‘I’ll fix with Gladdy about the boxes.’

That night Milton dreamed it was Esme Dunshea who had come to the upper orchard. Slowly she took off her dark coat, and then a green dress. She stood beneath an apple tree, skimpy underclothes revealing skin as white as flour. Once he and Billie Carew had followed his sisters and Esme Dunshea when they went to bathe in the stream that ran along the bottom of the orchards. In his dream Esme Dunshea turned and walked away, but to Milton’s disappointment she was fully dressed again.

The next morning that dream quickly faded to nothing, but the encounter with the stranger remained with Milton, and was as vivid as the reality had been. Every detail of the woman’s appearance clung tightly to some part of his consciousness – the black hair, the frail fingers outstretched, her coat and her scarf.

On the evening of that day, during the meal at the kitchen table, Milton’s father asked him to cut the bramble patch in the upper orchard. He meant the next morning, but Milton went at once. He stood among the trees in the twilight, knowing he was not there at his father’s behest but because he knew the woman would arrive. She entered the upper orchard by the gate that led to the lane and called down to where he was. He could hear her perfectly, although her voice was no more than a whisper.

‘I am St Rosa,’ the woman said.

She walked down the slope toward him, and he saw that she was dressed in the same clothes. She came close to him and placed her lips on his.

‘That is holy,’ she whispered.

She moved away. She turned to face him again before she left the orchard, pausing by the gate to the lane.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, ‘when the moment comes. There is too much fear.’

Milton had the distinct impression that the woman wasn’t alive.

Milton’s sister Hazel wrote every December, folding the pages of the year’s news inside her Christmas card. Two children whom their grandparents had never seen had been born to her in Leicester. Not once since her wedding had Hazel been back to County Armagh.

We drove to Avignon the first day even though it meant being up half the night. The children couldn’t have been better, I think the excitement exhausted them.

On the third Sunday in December the letter was on the mantelpiece of what the household had always called the back room, a room used only on Sundays in winter, when the rest of the year’s stuffiness was disguised by the smoke from a coal fire. Milton’s sister Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were present on the third Sunday in December, and Garfield was visiting for the weekend. Stewart sat on his own Sunday chair, grimacing to himself. Four o’clock tea with sandwiches, apple-pie and cakes, was taken on winter Sundays, a meal otherwise dispensed with.

‘They went travelling to France,’ Mr Leeson stated flatly, his tone betraying the disappointment he felt concerning his older daughter’s annual holiday.

‘France?’ Narrow-jawed and beaky, head cocked out inquisitively, the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon dutifully imbued his repetition of the word with a note of surprised disdain. It was he who had conducted Hazel’s wedding, who had delivered a private homily to the bride and bridegroom three days before the ceremony, who had said that at any time they could turn to him.

‘See for yourself.’ Mr Leeson inclined his tanned pate toward the mantelpiece. ‘Have you read Hazel’s letter, Addy?’

Addy said she had, not adding that she’d been envious of the journey to Avignon. Once a year she and Herbert and the children went for a week to Portrush, to a boarding-house with reduced rates for clergy.

‘France,’ her husband repeated. ‘You’d wonder at that.’

‘Aye, you would,’ her father agreed.

Milton’s eyes moved from face to face as each person spoke. There was fatigue in Addy’s prettiness now, a tiredness in the skin even, although she was only twenty-seven. His father’s features were impassive, nothing reflecting the shadow of resentment in his voice. A thought glittered in Herbert Cutcheon’s pale brown eyes and was accompanied by a private nod: Milton guessed he was saying to himself it was his duty to write to Hazel on this matter. The clergyman had written to Hazel before: Milton had heard Addy saying so in the kitchen.

‘I think Hazel explained in the letter,’ Mrs Leeson put in. ‘They’ll come one of these years,’ she added, although she, more than anyone, knew they wouldn’t. Hazel had washed her hands of the place.

‘Sure, they will,’ Garfield said.

Garfield was drunk. Milton watched him risking his observation, his lips drawn loosely back in a thick smile. Specks of foam lingered on the top of the beer can he held, around the triangular opening. He’d been drinking Heineken all afternoon. Mr Leeson drank only once a year, on the occasion of the July celebration; Herbert Cutcheon was teetotal. But neither disapproved of Garfield’s tippling when he came back for the weekend, because that was Garfield’s way and if you raised an objection you wouldn’t see him for dust.

Catching Milton’s eye on him, Garfield winked. He was not entirely the reason why Hazel would not return, but he contributed to it. For in Belfast Garfield was more than just a butcher’s assistant. Garfield had a role among the Protestant paramilitaries, being what he himself called a ‘hard-man volunteer’ in an organization intent on avenging the atrocities of the other side. The tit-for-tat murders spawned by that same hard-man mentality, the endless celebration of a glorious past on one side and the picking over of ancient rights on the other, the reluctance to forgive: all this was what Hazel had run away from. ‘Only talk,’ Mrs Leeson confidently dismissed Garfield’s reports of his activities as, recalling that he had always been a boaster. Mr Leeson did not comment.

‘Hi!’ Stewart suddenly exclaimed in the back room, the way he often did. ‘Hi! Hi!’ he shouted, his head bent sideways to his shoulder, his mouth flopping open, eyes beginning to roll.

‘Behave yourself, Stewart,’ Mrs Leeson sternly commanded. ‘Stop it now.’

Stewart took no notice. He completed his effort at communication, his fat body becoming awkward on the chair. Then the tension left him and he was quiet. Give Stewart a hug from all of us, Hazel’s letter said.

Addy collected her husband’s cup and her father’s. More tea was poured. Mrs Leeson cut more cake.

‘Now, pet.’ She broke a slice into portions for Stewart. ‘Good boy now.’

Milton wondered what they’d say if he mentioned the woman in the orchard, if he casually said that on the fourteenth of September, and again on the fifteenth, a woman who called herself St Rosa had appeared to him among the apple trees of the upper orchard. It wouldn’t have been necessary to say he’d dreamed about her also; the dream was just an ordinary thing, a dream he might have had about any woman or girl. ‘Her hair was strange,’ he might have said.

But Milton, who had kept the whole matter to himself, continued to do so. Later that evening, alone in the back room with Garfield, he listened while his brother hinted at his city exploits, which he always did when he’d been drinking. Milton watched the damp lips sloppily opening and closing, the thick smile flashing between statements about punishment meted out and premises raided, youths taken in for questioning, warnings issued. There was always a way to complete the picture, Garfield liked to repeat, and would tell about some Catholic going home in the rain and being given a lift he didn’t want to accept. Disposal completed the picture, you could call it that: you could say he was in the disposal business. When the phone rang in the middle of the night he always knew at once. No different from dealing with the side of a cow, a professional activity. Garfield always stopped before he came to the end of his tales; even when he’d had a few he left things to the imagination.

Every summer Mr Leeson gave the six-acre field for the July celebration - a loyal honouring, yet again renewed, of King William’s famous victory over Papist James in 1690. Bowler-hatted and sashed, the men assembled there on the twelfth of the month, their drums and flutes echoing over the Leeson lands. At midday there was the long march to the village, Mr Leeson himself prominent among the marchers. He kept a dark serge suit specially for Sundays and the July celebration, as his father and his grandfather had. Before Garfield had gone to Belfast he’d marched also, the best on the flute for miles around. Milton marched, but didn’t play an instrument because he was tone-deaf.

Men who had not met each other since the celebration last year came to the six-acre field in July. Mr Leeson’s elderly Uncle Willie came, and Leeson cousins and relatives by marriage. Milton and his friend Billie Carew were among the younger contingent. It pleased Mr Leeson and the other men of his age that boys made up the numbers, that there was no falling away, new faces every year. The Reverend Cutcheon gave an address before the celebration began.

With the drums booming and the flutes skilfully establishing the familiar tunes, the marchers swung off through the iron gate of the field, out on to the lane, later turning into the narrow main road. Their stride was jaunty, even that of Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie and that of Old Knipe, who was eighty-four. Chins were raised, umbrellas carried as rifles might be. Pride was everywhere on these faces; in the measured step and the music’s beat, in the swing of the arms and the firm grip of the umbrellas. No shoe was unpolished, no dark suit unironed. The men of this neighbourhood, by long tradition, renewed their Protestant loyalty and belief through sartorial display.

Milton’s salt-and-pepper jacket and trousers had been let down at the cuffs. This showed, but only on close scrutiny – a band of lighter cloth and a second band, less noticeable because it had faded, where the cuffs had been extended in the past. His mother had said, only this morning, that that was that, what material remained could not be further adjusted. But she doubted that Milton would grow any more, so the suit as it was should last for many years yet. While she spoke Milton felt guilty, as many times he had during the ten months that had passed since his experience in the upper orchard. It seemed wrong that his mother, who knew everything about him, even that he wouldn’t grow any more, shouldn’t have been confided in, yet he hadn’t been able to do it. Some instinct assured him that the woman would not return. There was no need for her to return, Milton’s feeling was, although he did not know where the feeling came from: he would have found it awkward, explaining all that to his mother. Each of the seasons that had passed since September had been suffused by the memory of the woman. That autumn had been warm, its shortening days mellow with sunshine until the rain came in November. She had been with him in the sunshine and the rain, and in the bitter cold that came with January. On a day when the frost remained, to be frozen again at nightfall, he had walked along the slope of the upper orchard and looked back at the long line of his footsteps on the whitened grass, for a moment surprised that hers weren’t there, miraculously, also. When the first primroses decorated the dry, warm banks of the orchards he found himself thinking that these familiar flowers were different this year because he was different himself and saw them in some different way. When summer came the memory of the woman was more intense.

‘They’ll draw in,’ a man near the head of the march predicted as two cars advanced upon the marchers. Obediently the cars pressed into a gateway to make room, their engines turned off, honouring the music. Women and children in the cars waved and saluted; a baby was held up, its small paw waggled in greeting. ‘Does your heart good, that,’ one of the men remarked.

The day was warm. White clouds were stationary, as if pasted on to the vast dome of blue. It was nearly always fine for the July celebration, a fact that did not pass unnoticed in the neighbourhood, taken to be a sign. Milton associated the day with sweat on his back and in his armpits and on his thighs, his shirt stuck to him in patches that later became damply cold. As he marched now the sun was hot on the back of his neck. ‘I wonder will we see the Kissane girl?’ Billie Carew speculated beside him.

The Kissane girl lived in one of the houses they passed. She and her two younger sisters usually came out to watch. Her father and her uncles and her brother George were on the march. She was the best-looking girl in the neighbourhood now that Milton’s sisters were getting on a bit. She had glasses, which she took off when she went dancing at the Cuchulainn Inn. She had her hair done regularly and took pains to get her eyeshadow right; she matched the shade of her lipstick to her dress. There wasn’t a better pair of legs in Ulster, Billie Carew claimed.

‘Oh, God!’ he muttered when the marchers rounded a bend and there she was with her two young sisters. She had taken her glasses off and was wearing a dress that was mainly pink, flowers like roses on it. When they drew nearer, her white sandals could be seen. ‘Oh, God!’ Billie Carew exclaimed again, and Milton guessed he was undressing the Kissane girl, the way they used to undress girls in church. One of the girl’s sisters had a Union Jack, which she waved.

Milton experienced no excitement. Last year he, too, had undressed the Kissane girl, which hadn’t been much different from undressing Esme Dunshea in church. The Kissane girl was older than Esme Dunshea, and older than himself and Billie Carew by five or six years. She worked in the chicken factory.

‘D’you know who she looks like?’ Billie Carew said. ‘Ingrid Bergman.’

‘Ingrid Bergman’s dead.’

Busy with his thoughts, Billie Carew didn’t reply. He had a thing about Ingrid Bergman. Whenever Casablanca was shown on the television nothing would get him out of the house. For the purpose he put her to it didn’t matter that she was dead.

‘God, man!’ Billie Carew muttered, and Milton could tell from the urgency of his intonation that the last of the Kissane girl’s garments had been removed.

At ten to one the marchers reached the green corrugated-iron sheds of McCourt’s Hardware and Agricultural Supplies. They passed a roadside water pump and the first four cottages of the village. They were in Catholic country now: no one was about, no face appeared at a window. The village was a single wide street, at one end Vogan’s stores and public house, at the other Tiernan’s grocery and filling station, where newspapers could be obtained. Next door was O’Hanlon’s public house and then the road widened, so that cars could turn in front of the Church of the Holy Rosary and the school. The houses of the village were colour-washed different colours, green and pink and blue. They were modest houses, none of more than two storeys.

As the marchers melodiously advanced upon the blank stare of so many windows, the stride of the men acquired an extra fervour. Arms were swung with fresh intent, jaws were more firmly set. The men passed the Church of the Holy Rosary, then halted abruptly. There was a moment of natural disarray as ranks were broken so that the march might be reversed. The Reverend Herbert Cutcheon’s voice briefly intoned, a few glances were directed at, and over, the nearby church. Then the march returned the way it had come, the music different, as though a variation were the hidden villagers’ due. At the corrugated sheds of McCourt’s Hardware and Agricultural Supplies the men swung off to the left, marching back to Mr Leeson’s field by another route.

The picnic was the reward for duty done, faith kept. Bottles appeared. There were sandwiches, chicken legs, sliced beef and ham, potato crisps and tomatoes. The men urinated in twos, against a hedge that never suffered from its annual acidic dousing – this, too, was said to be a sign. Jackets were thrown off, bowler hats thrown down, sashes temporarily laid aside. News was exchanged; the details of a funeral or a wedding passed on; prices for livestock deplored. The Reverend Herbert Cutcheon passed among the men who sat easily on the grass, greeting those from outside his parish whom he hadn’t managed to greet already, enquiring after womenfolk. By five o’clock necks and faces were redder than they had earlier been, hair less tidy, beads of perspiration catching the slanting sunlight. There was euphoria in the field, some drunkenness, and an occasional awareness of the presence of God.

‘Are you sick?’ Billie Carew asked Milton. ‘What’s up with you?’

Milton didn’t answer. He was maybe sick, he thought. He was sick or going round the bend. Since he had woken up this morning she had been there, but not as before, not as a tranquil presence. Since he’d woken she had been agitating and nagging at him.

‘I’m OK,’ he said.

He couldn’t tell Billie Carew any more than he could tell his mother, or anyone in the family, yet all the time on the march he had felt himself being pressed to tell, all the time in the deadened village while the music played, when they turned and marched back again and the tune was different. Now, at the picnic, he felt himself being pressed more than ever.

‘You’re bloody not OK,’ Billie Carew said.

Milton looked at him and found himself thinking that Billie Carew would be eating food in this field when he was as old as Old Knipe. Billie Carew with his acne and his teeth would be satisfied for life when he got the Kissane girl’s knickers off. ‘Here,’ Billie Carew said, offering him his half-bottle of Bushmills.

‘I want to tell you something,’ Milton said, finding the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon at the hedge where the urinating took place.

‘Tell away, Milton.’ The clergyman’s edgy face was warm with the pleasure the day had brought. He adjusted his trousers. Another day to remember, he said.

‘I was out in the orchards a while back,’ Milton said. ‘September it was. I was seeing how the apples were doing when a woman came in the top gate.’

‘A woman?’

‘The next day she was there again. She said she was St Rosa.’

‘What d’you mean, St Rosa, Milton?’

The Reverend Cutcheon had halted in his stroll back to the assembled men. He stood still, frowning at the grass by his feet. Then he lifted his head and Milton saw bewilderment, and astonishment, in his opaque brown eyes.

‘What d’you mean, St Rosa?’ he repeated.

Milton told him, and then confessed that the woman had kissed him twice on the lips, a holy kiss, as she’d called it.

‘No kiss is holy, boy. Now, listen to me, Milton. Listen to this carefully, boy.’

A young fellow would have certain thoughts, the Reverend Cutcheon explained. It was the way of things that a young fellow could become confused, owing to the age he was and the changes that had taken place in his body. He reminded Milton that he’d left school, that he was on the way to manhood. The journey to manhood could have a stumble or two in it, he explained, and it wasn’t without temptation. One day Milton would inherit the farm and the orchards, since Garfield had surrendered all claim to them. That was something he needed to prepare himself for. Milton’s mother was goodness itself, his father would do anything for you. If a neighbour had a broken fence while he was laid up in bed, his father would be the first to see to it. His mother had brought up four fine children, and it was God’s way that the fifth was afflicted. God’s grace could turn affliction into a gift: poor Stewart, you might say, but you only had to look at him to realize you were glad Stewart had been given life.

‘We had a great day today, Milton, we had an enjoyable day. We stood up for the people we are. That’s what you have to think of.’

In a companionable way the clergyman’s arm was placed around Milton’s shoulders. He’d put the thing neatly, the gesture suggested. He’d been taken aback but had risen to the occasion.

‘She won’t leave me alone,’ Milton said.

Just beginning to move forward, the Reverend Cutcheon halted again. His arm slipped from Milton’s shoulders. In a low voice he said:

‘She keeps bothering you in the orchards, does she?’

Milton explained. He said the woman had been agitating him all day, since the moment he awoke. It was because of that that he’d had to tell someone, because she was pressing him to.

‘Don’t tell anyone else, Milton. Don’t tell a single soul. It’s said now between the two of us and it’s safe with myself. Not even Addy will hear the like of this.’

Milton nodded. The Reverend Cutcheon said:

‘Don’t distress your mother and your father, son, with talk of a woman who was on about holiness and the saints.’ He paused, then spoke with emphasis, and quietly. ‘Your mother and father wouldn’t rest easy for the balance of their days.’ He paused again. ‘There are no better people than your mother and father, Milton.’

‘Who was St Rosa?’

Again the Reverend Cutcheon checked his desire to rejoin the men who were picnicking on the grass. Again he lowered his voice.

‘Did she ask you for money? After she touched you did she ask you for money?’

‘Money?’

‘There are women like that, boy.’

Milton knew what he meant. He and Billie Carew had many a time talked about them. You saw them on television, flamboyantly dressed on city streets. Billie Carew said they hung about railway stations, that your best bet was a railway station if you were after one. Milton’s mother, once catching a glimpse of these street-traders on the television, designated them ‘Catholic strumpets’. Billie Carew said you’d have to go careful with them in case you’d catch a disease. Milton had never heard of such women in the neighbourhood.

‘She wasn’t like that,’ he said.

‘You’d get a travelling woman going by and maybe she’d be thinking you had a coin or two on you. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Milton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get rid of the episode. Put it out of your mind.’

‘I was only wondering about what she said in relation to a saint.’

‘It’s typical she’d say a thing like that.’

Milton hesitated. ‘I thought she wasn’t alive,’ he said.

Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie used to preach. He had preached in the towns until he was too old for it, until he began to lose the thread of what he was saying. Milton had heard him. He and Garfield and his sisters had been brought to hear Uncle Willie in his heyday, a bible clenched in his right hand, gesturing with it and quoting from it. Sometimes he spoke of what happened in Rome, facts he knew to be true: how the Pope drank himself into a stupor and had to have the sheets of his bed changed twice in a night, how the Pope’s own mother was among the women who came and went in the papal ante-rooms.

Men still preached in the towns, at street corners or anywhere that might attract a crowd, but the preachers were fewer than they had been in the heyday of Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie because the popularity of television kept people in at nights, and because people were in more of a hurry. But during the days that followed the July celebration Milton remembered his great-uncle’s eloquence. He remembered the words he had used and the way he could bring in a quotation, and the way he was so certain. Often he had laid down that a form of cleansing was called for, that vileness could be exorcized by withering it out of existence.

The Reverend Cutcheon had been more temperate in his advice, even if what he’d said amounted to much the same thing: if you ignored what happened it wouldn’t be there any more. But on the days that followed the July celebration Milton found it increasingly impossible to do so. With a certainty that reminded him of his great-uncle’s he became convinced beyond all doubt that he was not meant to be silent. Somewhere in him there was the uncontrollable urge that he should not be. He asked his mother why the old man had begun to preach, and she replied that it was because he had to.

Father Mulhall didn’t know what to say.

To begin with, he couldn’t remember who St Rosa had been, even if he ever knew. Added to which, there was the fact that it wasn’t always plain what the Protestant boy was trying to tell him. The boy stammered rapidly through his account, beginning sentences again because he realized his meaning had slipped away, speaking more slowly the second time but softening his voice to a pitch that made it almost inaudible. The whole thing didn’t make sense.

‘Wait now till we have a look,’ Father Mulhall was obliged to offer in the end. He’d said at first that he would make some investigations about this saint, but the boy didn’t seem satisfied with that. ‘Sit down,’ he invited in his living-room, and went to look for Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

Father Mulhall was fifty-nine, a tall, wiry man, prematurely white-haired. Two sheepdogs accompanied him when he went to find the relevant volume. They settled down again, at his feet, when he returned. The room was cold, hardly furnished at all, the carpet so thin you could feel the boards.

‘There’s the Blessed Roseline of Villeneuve,’ Father Mulhall said, turning over the pages. ‘And the Blessed Rose Venerini. Or there’s St Rose of Lima. Or St Rosalia. Or Rose of Viterbo.’

‘I think it’s that one. Only she definitely said Rosa.’

‘Could you have fallen asleep? Was it a hot day?’

‘It wasn’t a dream I had.’

‘Was it late in the day? Could you have been confused by the shadows?’

‘It was late the second time. The first time it was the afternoon.’

‘Why did you come to me?’

‘Because you’d know about a saint.’

Father Mulhall heard how the woman who’d called herself St Rosa wouldn’t let the boy alone, how she’d come on stronger and stronger as the day of the July celebration approached, and so strong on the day itself that he knew he wasn’t meant to be silent, the boy said.

‘About what though?’

‘About her giving me the holy kiss.’

The explanation could be that the boy was touched. There was another boy in that family who wasn’t the full shilling either.

‘Wouldn’t you try getting advice from your own clergyman? Isn’t Mr Cutcheon your brother-in-law?’

‘He told me to pretend it hadn’t happened.’

The priest didn’t say anything. He listened while he was told how the presence of the saint was something clinging to you, how neither her features nor the clothes she’d worn had faded in any way whatsoever. When the boy closed his eyes he could apparently see her more clearly than he could see any member of his family, or anyone he could think of.

‘I only wanted to know who she was. Is that place in France?’

‘Viterbo is in Italy actually.’

One of the sheepdogs had crept on to the priest’s feet and settled down to sleep. The other was asleep already. Father Mulhall said:

‘Do you feel all right in yourself otherwise?’

‘She said not to be afraid. She was on about fear.’ Milton paused. ‘I can still feel her saying things.’

‘I would talk to your own clergyman, son. Have a word with your brother-in-law.’

‘She wasn’t alive, that woman.’

Father Mulhall did not respond to that. He led Milton to the hall-door of his house. He had been affronted by the visit, but he didn’t let it show. Why should a saint of his Church appear to a Protestant boy in a neighbourhood that was overwhelmingly Catholic, when there were so many Catholics to choose from? Was it not enough that that march should occur every twelfth of July, that farmers from miles away should bang their way through the village just to show what was what, strutting in their get-up? Was that not enough without claiming the saints as well? On the twelfth of July they closed the village down, they kept people inside. Their noisy presence was a reminder that beyond this small, immediate neighbourhood there was a strength from which they drew their own. This boy’s father would give you the time of day if he met you on the road, he’d even lean on a gate and talk to you, but once your back was turned he’d come out with his statements. The son who’d gone to Belfast would salute you and maybe afterwards laugh because he’d saluted a priest. It was widely repeated that Garfield Leeson belonged in the ganglands of the Protestant back streets, that his butcher’s skills came in handy when a job had to be done.

‘I thought she might be foreign,’ Milton said. ‘I don’t know how I’d know that.’

Two scarlet dots appeared in Father Mulhall’s scrawny cheeks. His anger was more difficult to disguise now; he didn’t trust himself to speak. In silence Milton was shown out of the house.

When he returned to his living-room Father Mulhall turned on the television and sat watching it with a glass of whiskey, his sheepdogs settling down to sleep again. ‘Now, that’s amazing!’ a chat-show host exclaimed, leading the applause for a performer who balanced a woman on the end of his finger. Father Mulhall wondered how it was done, his absorption greater than it would have been had he not been visited by the Protestant boy.

Mr Leeson finished rubbing his plate clean with a fragment of loaf bread, soaking into it what remained of bacon fat and small pieces of black pudding. Milton said:

‘She walked in off the lane.’

Not fully comprehending, Mr Leeson said the odd person came after the apples. Not often, but you knew what they were like. You couldn’t put an orchard under lock and key.

‘Don’t worry about it, son.’

Mrs Leeson shook her head. It wasn’t like that, she explained; that wasn’t what Milton was saying. The colour had gone from Mrs Leeson’s face. What Milton was saying was that a Papist saint had spoken to him in the orchards.

‘An apparition,’ she said.

Mr Leeson’s small eyes regarded his son evenly. Stewart put his side plate on top of the plate he’d eaten his fry from, with his knife and fork on top of that, the way he had been taught. He made his belching noise and to his surprise was not reprimanded.

‘I asked Father Mulhall who St Rosa was.’

Mrs Leeson’s hand flew to her mouth. For a moment she thought she’d scream. Mr Leeson said:

‘What are you on about, boy?’

‘I have to tell people.’

Stewart tried to speak, gurgling out a request to carry his two plates and his knife and fork to the sink. He’d been taught that also, and was always obedient. But tonight no one heeded him.

‘Are you saying you went to the priest?’ Mr Leeson asked.

‘You didn’t go into his house, Milton?’

Mrs Leeson watched, incredulous, while Milton nodded. He said

Herbert Cutcheon had told him to keep silent, but in the end he couldn’t. He explained that on the day of the march he had told his brother-in-law when they were both standing at the hedge, and later he had gone into Father Mulhall’s house. He’d sat down while the priest looked the saint up in a book.

‘Does anyone know you went into the priest’s house, Milton?’ Mrs Leeson leaned across the table, staring at him with widened eyes that didn’t blink. ‘Did anyone see you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Mr Leeson pointed to where Milton should stand, then rose from the table and struck him on the side of the face with his open palm. He did it again. Stewart whimpered, and became agitated.

‘Put them in the sink, Stewart,’ Mrs Leeson said.

The dishes clattered into the sink, and the tap was turned on as Stewart washed his hands. The side of Milton’s face was inflamed, a trickle of blood came from his nose.

Herbert Cutcheon’s assurance that what he’d heard in his father-in-law’s field would not be passed on to his wife was duly honoured. But when he was approached on the same subject a second time he realized that continued suppression was pointless. After a Sunday-afternoon visit to his in-laws’ farmhouse, when Mr Leeson had gone off to see to the milking and Addy and her mother were reaching down pots of last year’s plum jam for Addy to take back to the rectory, Milton had followed him to the yard. As he drove the four miles back to the rectory, the clergyman repeated to Addy the conversation that had taken place.

‘You mean he wants to preach?’ Frowning in astonishment, Addy half shook her head, her disbelief undisguised.

He nodded. Milton had mentioned Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie. He’d said he wouldn’t have texts or scriptures, nothing like that.

‘It’s not Milton,’ Addy protested, this time shaking her head more firmly.

‘I know it’s not.’

He told her then about her brother’s revelations on the day of the July celebration. He explained he hadn’t done so before because he considered he had made her brother see sense, and these matters were better not referred to.

‘Heavens above!’ Addy cried, her lower jaw slackened in fresh amazement. The man she had married was not given to the kind of crack that involved lighthearted deception, or indeed any kind of crack at all. Herbert’s virtues lay in other directions, well beyond the realm of jest. Even so, Addy emphasized her bewilderment by stirring doubt into her disbelief. ‘You’re not serious surely?’

He nodded without taking his eyes from the road. Neither of them knew of the visit to the priest or of the scene in the kitchen that had ended in a moment of violence. Addy’s parents, in turn believing that Milton had been made to see sense by his father’s spirited response, and sharing Herbert Cutcheon’s view that such matters were best left unaired, had remained silent also.

‘Is Milton away in the head?’ Addy whispered.

‘He’s not himself certainly. No way he’s himself.’

‘He never showed an interest in preaching.’

‘D’you know what he said to me just now in the yard?’

But Addy was still thinking about the woman her brother claimed to have conversed with. Her imagination had stuck there, on the slope of her father’s upper orchard, a Catholic woman standing among the trees.

‘Dudgeon McDavie,’ Herbert Cutcheon went on. ‘He mentioned that man.’

Nonplussed all over again, Addy frowned. Dudgeon McDavie was a man who’d been found shot dead by the roadside near Loughgall. Addy remembered her father coming into the kitchen and saying they’d shot poor Dudgeon. She’d been seven at the time; Garfield had been four, Hazel a year older; Milton and Stewart hadn’t been born. ‘Did he ever do a minute’s harm?’ she remembered her father saying. ‘Did he ever so much as raise his voice?’ Her father and Dudgeon McDavie had been schooled together; they’d marched together many a time. Then Dudgeon McDavie had moved out of the neighbourhood, to take up a position as a quantity surveyor. Addy couldn’t remember ever having seen him, although from the conversation that had ensued between her mother and her father at the time of his death it was apparent that he had been to the farmhouse many a time. ‘Blew half poor Dudgeon’s skull off’: her father’s voice, leaden and grey, echoed as she remembered. ‘Poor Dudgeon’s brains all over the tarmac. ’ Her father had attended the funeral, full honours because Dudgeon McDavie had had a hand in keeping law and order, part-time in the UDR. A few weeks later two youths from Loughgall were set upon and punished, although they vehemently declared their innocence.

‘Dudgeon McDavie’s only hearsay for Milton,’ Addy pointed out, and her husband said he realized that.

Drawing up in front of the rectory, a low brick building with metal-framed windows, he said he had wondered about going in search of Mr Leeson when Milton had come out with all that in the yard. But Milton had hung about by the car, making the whole thing even more difficult.

‘Did the woman refer to Dudgeon McDavie?’ Addy asked. ‘Is that it?’

‘I don’t know if she did. To tell you the truth, Addy, you wouldn’t know where you were once Milton gets on to this stuff. For one thing, he said to me the woman wasn’t alive.’

In the rectory Addy telephoned. ‘I’ll ring you back,’ her mother said and did so twenty minutes later, when Milton was not within earshot. In the ensuing conversation what information they possessed was shared: the revelations made on the day of the July celebration, what had later been said in the kitchen and an hour ago in the yard.

‘Dudgeon McDavie,’ Mrs Leeson reported quietly to her husband as soon as she replaced the receiver. ‘The latest thing is he’s on to Herbert about Dudgeon McDavie.’

Milton rode his bicycle one Saturday afternoon to the first of the towns in which he wished to preach. In a car park two small girls, sucking sweets, listened to him. He explained about St Rosa of Viterbo. He felt he was a listener too, that his voice came from somewhere outside himself – from St Rosa, he explained to the two small girls. He heard himself saying that his sister Hazel refused to return to the province. He heard himself describing the silent village, and the drums and the flutes that brought music to it, and the suit his father wore on the day of the celebration. St Rosa could mourn Dudgeon McDavie, he explained, a Protestant man from Loughgall who’d been murdered ages ago. St Rosa could forgive the brutish soldiers and their masked adversaries, one or other of them responsible for the shattered motor-cars and shrouded bodies that came and went on the television screen. Father Mulhall had been furious, Milton said in the car park, you could see it in his eyes: he’d been furious because a Protestant boy was sitting down in his house. St Rosa of Viterbo had given him her holy kiss, he said: you could tell that Father Mulhall considered that impossible.

The following Saturday Milton cycled to another town, a little further away, and on the subsequent Saturday he preached in a third town. He did not think of it as preaching, more just telling people about his experience. It was what he had to do, he explained, and he noticed that when people began to listen they usually didn’t go away. Shoppers paused, old men out for a walk passed the time in his company, leaning against a shop window or the wall of a public lavatory. Once or twice in an afternoon someone was abusive.

On the fourth Saturday Mr Leeson and Herbert Cutcheon arrived in Mr Leeson’s Ford Granada and hustled Milton into it. No one spoke a word on the journey back.

‘Shame?’ Milton said when his mother employed the word.

‘On all of us, Milton.’

In church people regarded him suspiciously, and he noticed that Addy sometimes couldn’t stop staring at him. When he smiled at Esme Dunshea she didn’t smile back; Billie Carew avoided him. His father insisted that in no circumstances whatsoever should he ever again preach about a woman in the orchards. Milton began to explain that he must, that he had been given the task.

‘No,’ his father said.

‘That’s the end of it, Milton,’ his mother said. She hated it even more than his father did, a woman kissing him on the lips.

The next Saturday afternoon they locked him into the bedroom he shared with Stewart, releasing him at six o’clock. But on Sunday morning he rode away again, and had again to be searched for on the streets of towns. After that, greater care was taken. Stewart was moved out of the bedroom and the following weekend Milton remained under duress there, the door unlocked so that he could go to the lavatory, his meals carried up to him by his mother, who said nothing when she placed the tray on a chest of drawers. Milton expected that on Monday morning everything would be normal again, that his punishment would then have run its course. But this was not so. He was released to work beside his father, clearing out a ditch, and all day there were never more than a couple of yards between them. In the evening he was returned to the bedroom. The door was again secured, and so it always was after that.

On winter Sundays when his sister Addy and the Reverend Cutcheon came to sit in the back room he remained upstairs. He no longer accompanied the family to church. When Garfield came from Belfast at a weekend he refused to carry food to the bedroom, although Milton often heard their mother requesting him to. For a long time now Garfield had not addressed him or sought his company.

When Milton did the milking his father didn’t keep so close to him. He put a padlock on the yard gate and busied himself with some task or other in one of the sheds, or else kept an eye on the yard from the kitchen. On two Saturday afternoons Milton climbed out of the bedroom window and set off on his bicycle, later to be pursued. Then one day when he returned from the orchards with his father he found that Jimmy Logan had been to the farmhouse to put bars on his bedroom window. His bicycle was no longer in the turf shed; he caught a glimpse of it tied on to the boot of the Ford Granada and deduced that it was being taken to be sold. His mother unearthed an old folding card-table, since it was a better height for eating off than the chest of drawers. Milton knew that people had been told he had become affected in the head, but he could tell from his mother’s demeanour that not even this could exorcize the shame he had brought on the family.

When the day of the July celebration came again Milton remained in his bedroom. Before he left the house his father led him to the lavatory and waited outside it in order to lead him back again. His father didn’t say anything. He didn’t say it was the day of the July celebration, but Milton could tell it was, because he was wearing his special suit. Milton watched the car drawing out of the yard and then heard his mother chatting to Stewart in the kitchen, saying something about sitting in the sun. He imagined the men gathering in the field, the clergyman’s blessing, the drums strapped on, ranks formed. As usual, the day was fine; from his bedroom window he could see there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

It wasn’t easy to pass the time. Milton had never been much of a one for reading, had never read a book from cover to cover. Sometimes when his mother brought his food she left him the weekly newspaper and he read about the towns it gave news of, and the different rural neighbourhoods, one of which was his own. He listened to his transistor. His mother collected all the jigsaw puzzles she could find, some of which had been in the farmhouse since Hazel and Garfield were children, others of a simple nature bought specially for Stewart. She left him a pack of cards, with only the three of diamonds missing, and a cardboard box containing scraps of wool and a spool with tacks in it that had been Addy’s French-knitting outfit.

On the day of the celebration he couldn’t face, yet again, completing the jigsaw of Windsor Castle or the Battle of Britain, or playing patience with the three of diamonds drawn on the back of an envelope, or listening all day to cheery disc-jockeys. He practised preaching, all the time seeing the woman in the orchard instead of the sallow features of Jesus or a cantankerous-looking God, white-haired and bearded, frowning through the clouds.

From time to time he looked at his watch and on each occasion established the point the march had reached. The Kissane girl and her sisters waved. Cars drew courteously in to allow the celebration to pass by. McCourt’s Hardware and Agricultural Supplies was closed, the village street was empty. Beyond the school and the Church of the Holy Rosary the march halted, then returned the way it had come, only making a change when it reached McCourt’s again, swinging off to the left.

Mrs Leeson unlocked the door and handed in a tray, and Milton imagined the chicken legs and the sandwiches in the field, bottles coming out, the men standing in a row by the hedge. ‘No doubt about it,’ his father said. ‘Dr Gibney’s seen cases like it before.’ A nutcase, his father intimated without employing the term, but when he was out of hearing one of the men muttered that he knew for a fact Dr Gibney hadn’t been asked for an opinion. In the field the shame that was spoken about spread from his father to the men themselves.

Milton tumbled out on the card-table the jigsaw pieces of a jungle scene and slowly turned them right side up. He didn’t know any more what would happen if they opened the door and freed him. He didn’t know if he would try to walk to the towns, if he’d feel again the pressure to do so or if everything was over, if he’d been cleansed, as his father’s old uncle would have said. Slowly he found the shape of a chimpanzee among the branches of a tree. He wished he were in the field, taking the half-bottle from Billie Carew. He wished he could feel the sun on his face and feel the ache going out of his legs after the march.

He completed the top left-hand corner of the jungle scene, adding brightly coloured birds to the tree with the chimpanzees in it. The voices of his mother and Stewart floated up to him from the yard, the incoherent growling of his brother, his mother soothing. From where he sat he saw them when they moved into view, Stewart lumbering, his mother holding his hand. They passed out of the yard, through the gate that was pad-locked when he did the milking. Often they walked down to the stream on a warm afternoon.

Again he practised preaching. He spoke of his father ashamed in the field, and the silent windows of the village. He explained that he had been called to go among people, bearing witness on a Saturday afternoon. He spoke of fear. It was that that was most important of all. Fear was the weapon of the gunmen and the soldiers, fear quietened the village. In fear his sister had abandoned the province that was her home. Fearful, his brother disposed of the unwanted dead.

Later Milton found the two back legs of an elephant and slipped the piece that contained them into place. He wondered if he would finish the jigsaw or if it would remain on the mildewed baize of the card-table with most of its middle part missing. He hadn’t understood why the story of Dudgeon McDavie had occurred to him as a story he must tell. It had always been there; he’d heard it dozens of times; yet it seemed a different kind of story when he thought about the woman in the orchard, when over and over again he watched her coming towards him, and when she spoke about fear.

He found another piece of the elephant’s grey bulk. In the distance he could hear the sound of a car. He paid it no attention, not even when the engine throbbed with a different tone, indicating that the car had drawn up by the yard gate. The gate rattled in a familiar way, and Milton went to his window then. A yellow Vauxhall moved into the yard.

He watched while a door opened and a man he had never seen before stepped out from the driver’s seat. The engine was switched off. The man stretched himself. Then Garfield stepped out too.

‘It took a death to get you back,’ her father said.

On the drive from the airport Hazel did not reply. She was twenty-six, two years younger than Addy, small and dark-haired, as Addy was, too. Ever since the day she had married, since her exile had begun, the truth had not existed between her and these people she had left behind. The present occasion was not a time for prevarication, not a time for pretence, yet already she could feel both all around her. Another death in a procession of deaths had occurred; this time close to all of them. Each death that came was close to someone, within some family: she’d said that years ago, saying it only once, not arguing because none of them wanted to have a conversation like that.

Mr Leeson slowed as they approached the village of Glenavy, then halted to allow two elderly women to cross the street. They waved their thanks, and he waved back. Eventually he said:

‘Herbert’s been good.’

Again Hazel did not respond. ‘God took him for a purpose,’ she imagined Herbert Cutcheon comforting her mother. ‘God has a job for him.’

‘How’s Addy?’

Her sister was naturally distressed also, she was told. The shock was still there, still raw in all of them.

‘That stands to reason.’

They slid into a thin stream of traffic on the motorway, Mr Leeson not accelerating much. He said:

‘I have to tell you what it was with Milton before we get home.’

‘Was it the Provos? Was Milton involved in some way?’

‘Don’t call them the Provos, Hazel. Don’t give them any kind of title. They’re not worthy of a title.’

‘You have to call them something.’

‘It wasn’t them. There was no reason why it should have been.’

Hazel, who had only been told that her brother had died violently – shot by intruders when he was alone in the house – heard how Milton had insisted he’d received a supernatural visitation from a woman. She heard how he had believed the woman was the ghost of a Catholic saint, how he had gone to the priest for information, how he had begun street-corner preaching.

‘He said things people didn’t like?’ she suggested, ignoring the more incredible aspect of this information.

‘We had to keep him in. I kept him by me when we worked, Garfield wouldn’t address him.’

‘You kept him in?’

‘Poor Milton was away in the head, Hazel. He’d be all right for a while, maybe for weeks, longer even. Then suddenly he’d start about the woman in the orchard. He wanted to travel the six counties preaching about her. He told me that. He wanted to stand up in every town he came to and tell his tale. He brought poor Dudgeon McDavie into it.’

‘What d’you mean, you kept him in?’

‘We sometimes had to lock his bedroom door. Milton didn’t know what he was doing, girl. We had to get rid of his bicycle, but even so he’d have walked. A couple of times on a Saturday he set off to walk, and myself and Herbert had to get him back.’

‘My God!’

‘You can’t put stuff like that in a letter. You can’t blame anyone for not writing that down for you. Your mother didn’t want to. “What’ve you said to Hazel?” I asked her one time and she said, “Nothing,” so we left it.’

‘Milton went mad and no one told me?’

‘Poor Milton did, Hazel.’

Hazel endeavoured to order the confusion of her thoughts. Pictures formed: of the key turned in the bedroom door; of the household as it had apparently become, her parents’ two remaining children a double burden – Stewart’s mongol blankness, Milton’s gibberish. ‘Milton’s been shot,’ she had said to her husband after the telephone call, shocked that Milton had apparently become involved, as Garfield was, drawn into it no doubt by Garfield. Ever since, that assumption had remained.

They left the motorway, bypassed Craigavon, then again made their way on smaller roads. This is home, Hazel found herself reflecting in that familiar landscape, the reminder seeming alien among thoughts that were less tranquil. Yet in spite of the reason for her visit, in spite of the upsetting muddle of facts she’d been presented with on this journey, she wanted to indulge the moment, to close her eyes and let herself believe that it was a pleasure of some kind to be back where she belonged. Soon they would come to Drumfin, then Anderson’s Crossroads. They would pass the Cuchulainn Inn, and turn before reaching the village. Everything would be familiar then, every house and cottage, trees and gateways, her father’s orchards.

‘Take it easy with your mother,’ he said. ‘She cries a lot.’

‘Who was it shot Milton?’

‘There’s no one has claimed who it was. The main concern’s your mother.’

Hazel didn’t say anything, but when her father began to speak again she interrupted him.

‘What about the police?’

‘Finmoth’s keeping an open mind.’

The car passed the Kissanes’ house, pink and respectable, delphiniums in its small front garden. Next came the ruined cowshed in the middle of Malone’s field, three of its stone walls standing, the fourth tumbled down, its disintegrating roof mellow with rust. Then came the orchards, and the tarred gate through which you could see the stream, steeply below.

Her father turned the car into the yard of the farmhouse. One of the dogs barked, scampering back and forth, wagging his tail as he always did when the car returned.

‘Well, there we are.’ With an effort Mr Leeson endeavoured to extend a welcome. ‘You’d recognize the old place still!’

In the kitchen her mother embraced her. Her mother had a shrunken look; a hollowness about her eyes, and shallow cheeks that exposed the shape of bones beneath the flesh. A hand grasped at one of Hazel’s and clutched it tightly, as if in a plea for protection. Mr Leeson carried Hazel’s suitcase upstairs.

‘Sit down.’ With her free hand Hazel pulled a chair out from the table and gently eased her mother toward it. Her brother grinned across the kitchen at her.

‘Oh, Stewart!’

She kissed him, hugging his awkward body. Pimples disfigured his big forehead, his spiky short hair tore uncomfortably at her cheek.

‘We should have seen,’ Mrs Leeson whispered. ‘We should have known.’

‘You couldn’t. Of course you couldn’t.’

‘He had a dream or something. That’s all he was on about.’

Hazel remembered the dreams she’d had herself at Milton’s age, half-dreams because sometimes she was awake – close your eyes and you could make Mick Jagger smile at you, or hear the music of U2 or The Damage. ‘Paul Hogan had his arms round me,’ Addy giggled once. Then you began going out with someone and everything was different.

‘Yet how would he know about a saint?’ her mother whispered. ‘Where’d he get the name from?’

Hazel didn’t know. It would have come into his head, she said to herself, but didn’t repeat the observation aloud. In spite of what she said, her mother didn’t want to think about it. Maybe it was easier for her mother, too, to believe her son had been away in the head, or maybe it made it worse. You wouldn’t know that, you couldn’t tell from her voice or from her face.

‘Don’t let it weigh on you,’ she begged. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself.’

Later Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were in the kitchen. Addy made tea and tumbled biscuits on to a plate. Herbert Cutcheon was solemn, Addy subdued. Like her father, Hazel sensed, both of them were worried about her mother. Being worried about her mother was the practical aspect of the grief that was shared, an avenue of escape from it, a distraction that was permitted. Oblivious to all emotion, Stewart reached out for a biscuit with pink marshmallow in it, his squat fingers and bitten nails ugly for an instant against the soft prettiness.

‘He’ll get the best funeral the Church can give him,’ Herbert Cutcheon promised.

Garfield stood a little away from them, with a black tie in place and his shoes black also, not the trainers he normally wore. Looking at him across the open grave, Hazel suddenly knew. In ignorance she had greeted him an hour ago in the farmhouse; they had stood together in the church; she had watched while he stepped forward to bear the coffin. Now, in the bleak churchyard, those images were illuminated differently. The shame had been exorcized, silence silently agreed upon.

‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,’ Herbert Cutcheon proclaimed, his voice heavy with the churchiness that was discarded as soon as his professional duties ceased, never apparent on a Sunday afternoon in the back room of the farmhouse. ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God.’

Earth was thrown on to the coffin. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven,’ Herbert Cutcheon suitably declared, and Hazel watched Garfield’s lips, in unison with Addy’s and their parents’. Stewart was there too, now and again making a noise. Mrs Leeson held a handkerchief to her face, clinging on to her husband in sudden bright sunshine. ‘And forgive us our trespasses.’ Garfield mouthed the words too.

With bitter calmness, Hazel allowed the facts to settle into place. Milton had been told not to. He had been told, even by Garfield himself, that you had fancies when you were fifteen. He had been told that talk about a Catholic saint was like the Catholics claiming one of their idolatrous statues had been seen to move. But in spite of all that was said to him Milton had disobeyed. ‘Your bodies a living sacrifice,’ Hazel’s Great-Uncle Willie used to thunder, steadfast in his certainty. Prominent among the mourners, the old man’s granite features displayed no emotion now.

‘Amen,’ Herbert Cutcheon prompted, and the mourners murmured and Mrs Leeson sobbed. Hazel moved closer to her, as Addy did, receiving her from their father’s care. All of them knew, Hazel’s thoughts ran on: her father knew, and her mother, and Addy, and Herbert Cutcheon. It was known in every house in the neighbourhood; it was known in certain Belfast bars and clubs, where Garfield’s hard-man reputation had been threatened, and then enhanced.

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ Addy whispered as the three women turned from the grave, but Hazel did not attempt to soothe her mother’s distress because she knew she could not. Her mother would go to her own grave with the scalding agony of what had happened still alive within her; her father would be reminded of the day of the occurrence on all the July marches remaining to him. The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be: that was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.