Selected Stories

Sacred Statues

They would manage, Nuala had always said when there had been difficulties before. Each time it was she who saw the family through: her faith in Corry, her calmness in adversity, her stubborn optimism were the strengths she brought to the marriage.

‘Would you try Mrs Falloway?’ she suggested when, more seriously than ever in the past, their indigence threatened to defeat them. It was a last resort, the best that desperation could do. ‘Wouldn’t you, Corry?’

Corry said nothing and Nuala watched him feeling ashamed, as he had begun to these last few weeks. It wouldn’t be asking much of Mrs Falloway, she said. Tiding them over for a year while he learnt the way of it in the stoneyard wouldn’t be much; and after that he’d be back on wages. The chance in the stoneyard was made for him; didn’t O’Flynn say it himself?

‘I couldn’t go near Mrs Falloway. I couldn’t at all.’

‘Only to put it to her, Corry. Only to say out what’s the truth.’

‘It came to nothing, what she was doing that time. Why’d she be interested in us now?’

‘All she saw in you’ll be lost if we don’t get assistance, Corry. Why wouldn’t she still take an interest?’

‘It’s all in the past, that.’

‘I know. I know.’

‘I’d be embarrassed going over there.’

‘Don’t I know that too, Corry?’

‘There’s work going on the roads.’

‘You’re not a roadworker, Corry.’

‘There’s things we have to do.’

Deliberately Nuala let a silence gather; and Corry broke it, as she knew he would.

‘I’d be a day going over there,’ he said, and might have added that there’d be the bus fare and something to pay for the loan of a bicycle in Carrick, but he didn’t.

‘A day won’t hurt, Corry.’

They were a couple of the same age – thirty-one – who’d known one another since childhood, Corry tall and bony, Nuala plumper and smaller, with a round, uncomplicated face, her fair hair cut shorter than it had been when she’d first become a wife. The youngest of their children, a girl, took after her in appearance; the boys were both as lean and gangling as their father.

‘You always did your best, Corry.’ The statement hung there, concluding their conversation, necessary because it was true, its repetition softening the crisis in their lives.

Corry’s workshop was a shed, all his saints in a row on a shelf he had put up. Beneath them were his Madonnas, his John the Baptist, and a single Crucifixion. His Stations were there too, propped against the rough concrete wall. Limewood and ash the woods were, apple and holly and box, oak that had come from a creamery paddle.

When the children left the house in the mornings to be picked up at Quirke’s crossroads and driven on to school, when Corry was out looking for work on a farm, Nuala often took pride in her husband’s gift; and in the quiet of his workshop she wondered how it would have been between them if he did not possess it, how she would feel about him if he’d been the master in a school or a counter-hand in one of the shops in Carrick, or permanently on a farm.

Corry’s saints had become her friends, Nuala sometimes thought, brought to life for her, a source of sympathy, and consolation when that was necessary. And Jesus Fell the Second Time were the words beneath the Station that was her favourite. Neither saints nor Stations belonged in a concrete shed, any more than the figures of the Virgin did, or any of the other carvings. They belonged in the places they’d been created for, the inspiration of their making becoming there the inspiration of prayer. Nuala was certain that this was meant to be, that in receiving his gift Corry had been entrusted with seeing that this came about. ‘You were meant for other times, Corry,’ a priest had remarked to him once, but not unkindly or dismissively, as if recognizing that even if the present times were different from those he spoke of, Corry would persevere. A waste of himself it would be otherwise, a waste of the person he was.

Nuala closed the shed door behind her. She fed her hens and then walked through the vegetable patch she cultivated herself. Mrs Falloway would understand; she had before, she would again. The living that Corry’s gift failed to make for him would come naturally when he had mastered the craft of cutting letters on head-stones in O’Flynn’s yard. The headstones were a different kind of thing from his sacred statues but they’d be enough to bring his skill to people’s notice, to the notice of bishops and priests as well as anyone else’s. Sooner or later everyone did business in a stoneyard; when he’d come to the house to make the offer O’Flynn had said that too.

In the field beyond Nuala’s vegetable garden the tethered goat jerked up its head and stared at her. She loosened the chain on the tether post and watched while the goat pawed at the new grass before eating it. The fresh, cool air was sharp on her face and for a moment, in spite of the trouble, she was happy. At least this place was theirs: the field, the garden, the small, remote house that she and Corry had come to when Mrs Falloway lent them the asking price, so certain was she that Corry would one day be a credit to her. While still savouring this moment of elation, Nuala felt it slipping away. Naturally, it was possible that Corry would not succeed in the mission she had sent him on: optimist or not, she was still close to the reality of things. In the night she had struggled with that, wondering how she should prepare him, and herself, for the ill fortune of his coming back empty-handed. It was then that she had remembered the Rynnes. They’d come into her thoughts as she imagined an inspiration came to Corry; not that he ever talked like that, but still she felt she knew. She had lain awake going over what had occurred to her, rejecting it because it upset her, because it shocked her even to have thought of it. She prayed that Mrs Falloway would be generous, as she had been before.

When he reached the crossroads Corry waited at the petrol pumps for the bus to Carrick. It was late but it didn’t matter, since Mrs Falloway didn’t know he was coming. On the way down from the house he’d considered trying to telephone, to put it to her if she was still there what Nuala had put to him, to save himself the expense of the journey. But when first she’d brought the subject up, Nuala had said that this wasn’t something that could be talked about on the phone even if he managed to find out Mrs Falloway’s number, which he hadn’t known in the past.

In Carrick, at Hosey’s bicycle shop, he waited while the tyres of an old Raleigh were pumped up for him. New batteries were put in the lamp in case he returned after dark, although he kept assuring young Hosey that it wouldn’t be possible to be away for so long: the bus back was at three.

It was seven miles to Mountroche House, mostly on a flat bog road bounded by neither ditches nor fencing. Corry remembered it from the time he and Nuala had lived in Carrick, when he’d worked in the Riordans’ joinery business and they’d had lodgings in an upstairs room at her mother’s. It was then that he began to carve his statues, his instinctive artistry impressing the Riordan brothers, and Mrs Falloway when the time came. It surprised Corry himself, for he hadn’t known it was there.

Those times, the first few years of marriage, cheered him as he rode swiftly on. It could be that Nuala was right, that Mrs Falloway would be pleased to see him, that she’d understand why they hadn’t been able to pay anything back. Nuala had a way of making good things happen, Corry considered; she guessed what they might be and then you tried for them.

The road was straight, with hardly a curve until the turf bogs eventually gave way to hills. Hedges and trees began, fields of grass or crops. Mountroche House was at the end of an unkempt avenue that continued for another three-quarters of a mile.

The Rynnes lived in a grey, pebble-dashed bungalow at the crossroads, close to the petrol pumps they operated, across the main road from Quirke’s SuperValu. They were well-to-do: besides the petrol business, there was Rynne’s insurance agency, which he conducted from the bungalow. His wife attended to the custom at the pumps.

When Nuala rang the doorbell the Rynnes answered it together. They had a way of doing that when both of them were in; and they had a way of conducting their visitors no further than the hall until the purpose of the interruption was established. An insurance matter was usually enough to permit further access.

‘I was passing by,’ Nuala said, ‘on my way to the SuperValu.’

The Rynnes nodded. Their similar elongated features suggested that they might be brother and sister rather than man and wife. They both wore glasses, Rynne’s dark-rimmed and serious, his wife’s light and pale. They were a childless couple.

‘Is it insurance, Nuala?’ Rynne enquired.

She shook her head. She’d just looked in, she said, to see how they were getting on. ‘We often mention you,’ she said, taking a liberty with the facts.

‘Arrah, we’re not bad at all,’ Rynne said. ‘Game ball, would you say, Etty?’

‘Oh, I would, I would.’

The telephone rang and Rynne went to answer it. Nuala could hear him saying he was up to his eyes this morning. ‘Would tomorrow do?’ he suggested. ‘Would I come up in the evening?’

‘I’m sorry, Etty. You’re busy.’

‘It’s only I’m typing his proposals. God, it takes your time, and the pumps going too! Twenty-six blooming pages every one of them!’

In spite of its plaintive note, it was cheerful talk, relegating to its place beneath the surface what had been disguised when Rynne said they were game ball: neither Etty Rynne’s failure to become pregnant nor the emotional toll it had taken of both husband and wife was ever mentioned by them, but the fact and its consequences were well known in the neighbourhood. It was even said that dishearteningly fruitless enquiries had been made regarding the possibility of adoption.

‘Goodbye so, Etty.’ Nuala smiled and nodded before she left, the sympathy of a mother in her eyes. She would have liked to commiserate, but spoken words would have been tactless.

‘You’re all well above, Nuala?’

‘We are.’

‘Tell Corry I was asking for him.’

‘I will of course.’

Nuala wheeled her bicycle across the road and propped it against the side wall of Quirke’s SuperValu. While she was shopping – searching for the cheap lines with a sell-by date due, bundling the few items she could afford into a wire basket – she thought about the Rynnes. She saw them almost as visibly as she had ten minutes ago seen the faraway, sorrowful look in Etty’s pale-brown eyes; she heard the unvoiced disappointment that, in both husband and wife, dwindled into weariness. They had given up already, not knowing that they needn’t yet: all that, again, passed through Nuala’s reflections.

She went on thinking about the Rynnes as she rode away from the crossroads, up the long hill to her house. They were decent people, tied into themselves only because of their childlessness, because of what the longing had done to them. She remembered them as they’d been when first they’d married, the winter card parties they invited people to, Etty like a fashion-plate for each occasion, the stories Rynne brought back from his business travels.

‘Would it be wrong?’ Nuala whispered to herself, since there was no one there to hear. ‘Would it be against God?’

Unhooking her shopping bags from the handlebars when she reached the house, she asked herself the same questions again, her voice loud now in the stillness. If Corry did well with Mrs Falloway there wouldn’t be a need to wonder if it would be wrong. There wouldn’t even be a need – when years had gone by and they looked back to the bad time there’d been – to mention to Corry what had come into her mind. If Mrs Falloway came up trumps you’d make yourself forget it, which was something that could be done if you tried.

It was a white house for the most part, though grey and green in places where the colourwash was affected. Roches had lived at Mountroche for generations, until the family came to an end in the 1950s; Mrs Falloway had bought it cheaply after it had been empty for seventeen years.

Corry heard the bell jangling in the depths, but no one answered the summons. On the bus and as he rode across the bog he had worried in case Mrs Falloway had gone, in case years ago she had returned to England; when he jerked the bell-pull for the third time he worried again. Then there was a sound somewhere above where he stood. A window opened and Mrs Falloway’s voice called down.

‘Mrs Falloway?’ He stepped backwards on to the gravel in order to look up. ‘Mrs Falloway?’

‘Yes, it’s me. Hullo.’

‘Hullo, Mrs Falloway.’

He wouldn’t have recognized her and wondered if she recognized him after so long. He said who he was.

‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Falloway said. ‘Wait a minute for me.’

When she opened her hall door she was welcoming. She smiled and held a hand out. ‘Come in, come in.’

They passed through a shabby hall and sat in a drawing-room that smelt of must. The cold ashes of a fire were partly covered with dead hydrangeas, deposited there from a vase. The room seemed choked with what littered its surfaces: newspapers and magazines, drawings, books face downward as if to mark a place, empty punnets, bric-à-brac in various stages of repair, a summer hat, a pile of clothes beside a work-basket.

‘You’ve come on a bicycle, Corry?’ Mrs Falloway said.

‘Only from Carrick. I got the bus to Carrick.’

‘My dear, you must be exhausted. Let me give you tea at the very least.’

Mrs Falloway was gone for nearly twenty minutes, causing Corry some agitation when he thought of the three o’clock bus. He and Nuala had sat waiting in this room when they’d come to the house the first time, after Corry got the letter. They’d sat together on the sofa that was a receptacle for oddments now; the room had been tidier then, Mrs Falloway had been brisker. She’d talked all the time, full of her plans, a table laid in the big bow window to which she brought corned beef and salad, and toast that was moist with the butter she’d spread, and Kia-Ora orange, and tea and fruitcake.

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ she said now, returning with a plate of biscuits, and cups and saucers and a tea-pot. The biscuits were decorated with a pink mush of marshmallow and raspberry jam.

Corry was glad of the tea, which was strong and hot. The biscuit he took had gone soft, but even so he liked it. Once in a while Nuala bought the same kind for the children.

‘What a lovely surprise!’ Mrs Falloway said.

‘I wondered were you still here.’

‘I’m here for ever now, I think.’

A dismal look had crept into her face, as if she knew why he had come. If she’d thought about it, she would have guessed long ago about the plight they were in. He wasn’t here to say it was her fault; he hoped she didn’t think that, because of course it wasn’t. All the blame was his.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t manage to pay anything back,’ he said.

‘You weren’t expected to, Corry.’

She was a tall woman, seeming fragile now. When she’d been younger her appearance had been almost intimidating: determination had influenced the set of her features and seemed to be there again in her wide mouth and saucer eyes, in her large hands as they gestured for attention. Swiftly her smile had become stern or insistent; now it was vaguely beseeching; her piled-up hair, which Corry remembered as black with a few strands of grey, had no black left in it. There was a tattered look about her that went with the room they were in.

‘You have children now, Corry?’

‘We have three. Two boys and a girl.’

‘You’re finding work?’

He shook his head. ‘It never got going,’ he said. ‘All that.’

‘I’m sorry, Corry.’

Soon after Mrs Falloway bought Mountroche House and came to live there she had attended the funeral of the elderly widow who’d been the occupant of the Mountroche gate-lodge. Being, as she put it, a black Protestant from England, who had never, until then, entered an Irish Catholic church, she had not before been exposed to such a profusion of plaster statues as at that funeral Mass. I hope you do not consider it interference from an outsider, she wrote in her first letter to Bishop Walshe, but it is impossible not to be aware of the opportunity there is for young craftsmen and artists. With time on her hands, she roved Bishop Walshe’s diocese in her Morris Minor, taking photographs of grottoes that featured solitary Virgin Marys or pietàs, or towering crucifixions. How refreshing it would be, she enthused to Bishop Walshe when eventually she visited him, to see the art of the great high crosses of Ireland brought into the modern Church, to see nativities and annunciations in stained glass, to have old lecterns and altar furniture replaced with contemporary forms. She left behind in the Bishop’s hall a selection of postcards she had obtained from Italy, reproductions of the bas-reliefs of Mino da Fiesole and details from the pulpit in Siena cathedral. When she had compiled a list of craftsmen she wrote to all of them, and visited those who lived within a reasonable distance of Mountroche House. To numerous priests and bishops she explained that what was necessary was to bring wealth and talent together; but for the most part she met with opposition and indifference. Several bishops wrote back crossly, requesting her not to approach them again.

Breaking in half another biscuit, Corry remembered the letter he had received himself. ‘Will you look at this!’ he had exclaimed the morning it arrived. Since he had begun to carve figures in his spare time at the joinery he had been aware of a vocation, of wishing to make a living in this particular way, and Mrs Falloway’s letter reflected entirely what he felt: that the church art with which he was familiar was of poor quality. ‘Who on earth is she?’ he wondered in bewilderment when he’d read the letter through several times. Less than a week later Mrs Falloway came to introduce herself.

‘I’ve always been awfully sorry,’ she repeated now. ‘Sorrier than I can say.’

‘Ah, well.’

When it was all over, all her efforts made, her project abandoned, Mrs Falloway had written in defeat to a friend of her distant schooldays. Well, yes, I am giving up the struggle. There is a long story to tell, which must wait until next you come for a few summer weeks. Enough to say, that everything has changed in holy Ireland. Mrs Falloway spoke of that to Corry now, of her feelings at the time, which she had not expressed to him before. The Church had had enough on its hands, was how she put it; the appearance of things seemed trivial compared with the falling away of congregations and the tide of secular attack. Without knowing it, she had chosen a bad time.

‘It was guilt when I gave you that poor little house, Corry. I’d misled you with my certainties that weren’t certainties at all. A galumphing English woman!’

‘Ah no, no.’

‘Ah yes, I’m afraid. I should have restrained you, not urged you to give up your employment in the joinery.’

‘I wanted to.’

‘You’re hard up now?’

‘We are a bit, to tell the truth.’

‘Is that why you’ve come over?’

‘Well, it is.’

She shook her head. There was another pause and then she said: ‘I’m hard up myself, as things are.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Are you in a bad way, Corry?’

‘O’Flynn’ll give me a place in the stoneyard at Guileen. He’s keen because I’d learn the stone quickly, the knowledge I have with the wood. It’s not like he’d be taking on a full apprentice. It’s not like the delay there’d be until some young fellow’d get the hang of it.’

‘You’d be lettering gravestones?’

‘I would. He’d put me on wages after a twelve-month. The only thing is, I’d be the twelve-month without a penny. I do a few days on a farm here and there if there’s anything going, but I’d have to give that up.’

‘The stoneyard seems the answer then.’

‘I’d be in touch with anyone who’d maybe be interested in the statues. I’d have them by me in the yard. A priest or a bishop still looking for something would maybe hear tell I could do a Stations. O’Flynn said that to Nuala.’

They went on talking. Mrs Falloway poured out more tea. She pressed Corry to have another biscuit.

‘I’d have the wages steady behind me,’ Corry said, ‘once we managed the year. I’d ride over to Guileen every morning on the bike we have, no problem at all.’

‘I haven’t money, Corry.’

There was a quietness in the room then, neither of them saying anything, but Corry didn’t go at once. After a few moments they talked about the time in the past. Mrs Falloway offered to cook something, but Corry said no. He stood up as he did so, explaining about the three o’clock bus.

At the hall door Mrs Falloway again said she was sorry, and Corry shook his head.

‘Nuala’s tried for work herself only there’s nothing doing. There’s another baby coming,’ Corry said, feeling he should pass that on also.

When Nuala heard, she said it had been a forlorn hope anyway, and when Corry described the state of Mountroche House she felt sorry for Mrs Falloway, whose belief in Corry had always seemed to Nuala to be a confirmation of the sacred nature of his gift, as if Mrs Falloway had been sent into their lives to offer that encouragement. Even though her project had failed, it was hardly by chance that she had come to live only fourteen miles from Carrick at a time when Corry was employed in the Riordans’ joinery; and hardly by chance that she’d become determined in her intentions when she saw the first of his saints. He’d made the little figure of St Brigid for Father Ryan to set in the niche in St Brigid’s parish hall even though Father Ryan couldn’t pay him anything for it. Whenever Nuala was in Carrick she called in at the parish hall to look again at it, remembering her amazement – similar to Mrs Falloway’s – when she’d first seen it. ‘He has a right way with a chisel,’ O’Flynn said when he’d made his offer of employment in the stoneyard. ‘I don’t know did I ever see better.’ For Nuala it was all of a piece – the first of the saints, and Mrs Falloway coming to live near by, and O’Flynn’s offer when they’d nearly given up hope. She could feel it in her bones that that was how it was.

‘Rest yourself,’ she urged Corry in the kitchen, ‘while I’ll get the tea.’

‘They all right?’

They were out playing in the back field, she said; they’d been no trouble since they’d come in. She spread out rashers of streaky bacon on the pan that was warming on the stove. She’d gone down to the SuperValu, she said, and Corry told her how he’d nearly missed the bus back.

‘He was drawing away. I had to stop him.’

‘I shouldn’t have sent you over on that awful old trek, Corry.’

‘Ah no, no. To tell you the truth, it was good to see her. Except she was a bit shook.’

He talked about the journey on the bus, the people on it when he was coming back. Nuala didn’t mention the Rynnes.

‘Glory be to God!’ Etty Rynne exclaimed. She felt shaky so she sat down, on a chair by the hallstand. ‘I don’t think I understood you,’ she said, although she knew she had.

She listened, not wanting to, when Nuala went into it. ‘It’d be April,’ Nuala said and repeated the sum of money she had mentioned already. Late April, she thought, maybe just into May. She’d never been early, she said.

‘Himself would say it was against the law, Nuala. I’d wonder was it, myself.’

The daylight in the hall had blurs of blue and pink in it from the coloured panes on either side of the front door. It was a dim, soft light because of that, and while she tried to gather her thoughts together Etty Rynne found herself thinking that its cloudiness was suitable for the conversation that was being conducted – neither of them able to see the other’s face clearly, her own incomprehension.

‘It would be confidential between us,’ Nuala said, ‘that there was money.’

Not meaning to, and in a whisper, Etty Rynne repeated that. A secret was what was meant: a secret kept for ever among the four of them, a secret that was begun already because Nuala had waited for the car to drive off, maybe watching from the SuperValu’s windows. She’d have seen him walking out of the bungalow; when the car had gone she’d have crossed the road.

‘Listen to me, Etty.’

Corry’s statues came into what Nuala said, the wooden figures he made, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, St Brigid in the St Brigid’s Hall in Carrick. And Nuala trying for work in the SuperValu and anywhere she could think of came into it. With the baby due she’d be tied down, but she’d have managed somehow if there was work, only there wasn’t. How Corry had drawn a blank with a woman whose name was unfamiliar came into it. And O’Flynn who had the stoneyard at Guileen did.

‘O’Flynn has his insurances with us.’ For a moment in her mind’s eye Etty Rynne saw the bulky grey-haired stonemason, who always dropped the premiums in himself in case they went astray, who afterwards drew his Peugeot pick-up in at the pumps for a fill-up. It was a relief when all that flickered in Etty Rynne’s memory, after the shock that had left her weak in the legs and wanting to gasp and not being able to.

‘It’s a long time since you put the room ready, Etty.’

‘Did I show it to you?’

‘You did one time.’

She used to show it to people, the small room at the back of the bungalow that she’d painted a bright buttercup shade, the door and window-sills in white gloss.

‘It’s still the same,’ she said.

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

She’d made the curtains herself, blue that matched the carpet, dolls playing ring-a-roses on them. They’d never bought furniture for the little room. Tempting Providence it would be, he said.

‘There’d be no deception,’ Nuala said. ‘No lie, nothing like that. Only the money side kept out of it.’

Etty nodded. Like a dream, it was disordered and peculiar: the ring at the door and Nuala smiling there, and standing in the hall with Nuala and having to sit down, her face going red and then the blood draining out of it when Nuala asked if she had savings in the bank or in a credit society, and mentioning the sum that would be enough.

‘I couldn’t take your baby off of you, Nuala.’

‘I wouldn’t be deprived. I’d have another one, maybe two or three. A bit of time gone by and people would understand.’

‘Oh God, I doubt they would.’

‘It isn’t against the law, Etty. No way.’

‘I couldn’t. I never could.’ Pregnancy made you fanciful sometimes and she wondered if it was that that had got at Nuala. She didn’t say it in case it made things worse. Slowly she shook her head. ‘God, I couldn’t,’ she said again.

‘Nowadays if a man and woman can’t have a baby there’s things can be done.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘Nowadays -’

‘I couldn’t do what you’re saying, Nuala.’

‘Is it the money?’

‘It’s everything, Nuala. It’s what people’d say. He’d blow his head off if he knew what you’re after suggesting. It would bring down the business, he’d say. Nobody’d come near us.’

‘People -’

‘They’d never come round to it, Nuala.’

A silence came, and the silence was worse than the talk. Then Nuala said:

‘Would we sit down to a cup of coffee?’

‘God, I’m sorry. Of course we will.’

She could feel sweat on the sides of her body and on her neck and her forehead. The palms of her hands were cold. She stood up and it was better than before.

‘Come into the kitchen.’

‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Etty.’

Filling the kettle, spooning Nescafé into two cups, pouring in milk, Etty Rynne felt her jittery unease beginning to recede, leaving her with stark astonishment. She knew Nuala well. She’d known her since they were six, when first they’d been at school together. There had never been any sign whatsoever of stuff like this: Nuala was what she looked like, down-to-earth and sensible, both feet on the ground.

‘The pregnancy? Would it be that, Nuala?’

‘It’s no different from the others. It’s just that I thought of the way things are with you. And with Corry, talking about going to work on the roads.’

Two troubles, Etty Rynne heard then, and something good drawn out of them when you’d put them together. That’s all it was, Nuala said; no more than that.

‘What you said will never go outside these four walls,’ Etty Rynne promised. ‘Nor mentioned within them either.’ It was a woman’s thing, whatever it was. Wild horses wouldn’t drag the conversation they’d had out of her. ‘Didn’t you mean well? Don’t I know you did?’

The coffee calmed their two different moods. They walked through the narrow hall together and a cold breeze blew in when the front door was opened. A car drew up at the petrol pumps and Etty Rynne hurried to attend to it. She waved when Nuala rode away from the crossroads on the bicycle she shared with her husband.

‘It’s how it is,’ Corry said when he rejected O’Flynn’s offer of a place in the stoneyard, and he said it again when he agreed to work on the roads.

Stubbornly, Nuala considered that it needn’t be how it was. It was ridiculous that there should live within a mile of one another a barren wife and a statue-maker robbed by adverse circumstances of his purpose in God’s world. It was stupid and silly and perverse, when all that had to be done was to take savings out of a bank. The buttercup-yellow room so lovingly prepared would never now be occupied. In the tarmac surfaces he laid on roads Corry would see the visions he had betrayed.

Nuala nursed her anger, keeping it to herself. She went about her tasks, collecting eggs from where her hens had laid, preparing food, kneading dough for the bread she made every second day; and all the time her anger nagged. It surely was not too terrible a sin, too redolent of insidious presumption, that people should impose an order of their own on what they were given? Had she been clumsy in her manner of putting it to Etty Rynne? Or wrong not to have revealed her intentions to Corry in the hope that, with thought, he would have accepted the sense of them? But doubt spread then: Corry never would have; no matter how it had been put, Etty Rynne would have been terrified.

Corry bought new boots before he went to work on the roads. They were doing a job on the quarry boreen, he said, re-surfacing it because of the complaints there’d been from the lorry drivers. A protective cape was supplied to him in case there’d be rain.

On the night before his new work began Nuala watched him applying waterproof stuff to the boots and rubbing it in. They were useless without it, he’d been told. He took it all in his stride.

‘Things happen differently,’ he said, as if something in Nuala’s demeanour allowed him to sense her melancholy. ‘We’re never in charge.’

She didn’t argue; there was no point in argument. She might have confessed instead that she had frightened Etty Rynne; she might have tried to explain that her wild talk had been an effort to make something good out of what there was, as so often she had seen the spread of angels’ wings emerging from roughly sawn wood. But all that was too difficult, so Nuala said nothing.

Her anger was still merciless when that day ended; and through the dark of the night she felt herself oppressed by it and bleakly prayed, waiting for a response that did not come. She reached out in the morning dusk to hold for a moment her husband’s hand. Had he woken she would have told him all she had kept to herself, unable now to be silent.

But it was Corry’s day that was beginning, and it was he who needed sympathy and support. Making breakfast for him and for her children, Nuala gave him both as best she could, banishing from her mood all outward traces of what she knew would always now be private. When the house was empty again but for herself, she washed up the morning’s dishes and tidied the kitchen as she liked to have it. She damped the fire down in the stove. Outside, she fed her hens.

In Corry’s workshop she remained longer than she usually did on her morning visit to the saints who had become her friends: St Laurence with his gridiron, St Gabriel the messenger, St Clare of Assisi, St Thomas the Apostle and blind St Lucy, St Catherine, St Agnes. Corry had made them live for her and she felt the first faint slipping away of her anger as they returned her gaze with undisturbed tranquillity. Touched by it, lost in its peace, she sensed their resignation too. The world, not she, had failed.