The old priest wrapped his hands around his pint of Guinness as if it were a cross.
“What happened was they picked me up in the Shankill, kidnapped me you could say, if ordering a man t’get into a car at gunpoint is kidnapping. We drove a distance from Belfast. It’s hard to say how far, for I scarcely recognized anything we passed, so dark it was. I’ve never seen a blacker night, dark as devil’s dung. I think where we ended up was Ballykillen, that’s north; I think we were near Craigavon.
“They talked the whole way, as if they were just a bunch of the lads out for a night on the town. There were three of them, a three-man unit-IRA, of course. And then they told me why they’d picked me up; they needed a priest to administer last rites.
I said to them, ‘You could surely of got a priest nearer to wherever it is yer taking me, now, couldn’t you?’ He said, ‘Ye looked good to us, Father.’ I asked, ‘Who’s sick-to-dying they had to scrape a priest off the streets?’ They laughed harder. ‘It’s an execution, Father. We’re about to kill a man.’
“I told them, no, I couldn’t do this, watch a man be murdered.
“ ‘But you won’t have to watch, Father.’
“Finally we stopped in front of this white cottage that in the pitch blackness looked like a moon against the sky. We went in. They’d taken a sledgehammer to the door, which I’d learned was just the IRA’s way of knocking. In the parlor, or what was left of it, for they’d pretty much trashed it, sat a man tied to the chair he was in. I don’t know if I ever saw a more pitiable sight than this fellow asking me to help him and knowing he was going to be executed. Every man there had a machine gun. I asked them what he’d done but they just waved the question away and told me to get on with it. I told this poor devil that only God could help him now and it was better to die absolved of his sins. Those words sounded so empty, what good were they to him? The three of these IRA boyos standing round with their guns. I did what they wanted. They took me back to the car and told me to wait.
“Why didn’t I stay with him? They wouldn’t’ve let me, but still… I would’ve gone to the police, but if I said anything to the police-well, those killers and all the others would still execute victims, but without any priest to offer them absolution. And yet I think there must’ve been something I could do. It was twelve years ago that happened.
“What do you think?”
“That you didn’t have a choice, Father. Any more than if you’d been asked to tell something you’d heard in the confessional.”
The old priest was silent, looking at his beer. It had gone down in the pint by barely an inch with all of his talking. He said, “What are you here for? In Dublin, I mean.”
“Looking for someone.”
“Ah. Well, I reckon we all are, that. But can I buy you a pint before you have to go on looking?” The priest smiled.
So did Jury. Still, he rose, though he had no place he had to be and the search seemed hopeless.
“Some other time,” said Jury. “Nice talking to you, Father.”
PART III. Blessings and Curses
21
He had driven back to Northants, packed up the Bentley, and made the long drive to Bletchley (sans Agatha, who had blessedly decided to remain in Long Piddleton a bit longer). Melrose kept his eye out for Chick’nKings along the A-road, but saw only Little Chefs.
He parked the car in the garage, which sat some distance from the house and which might once have been a caretaker’s cottage, although the size of the property did not seem to warrant an extra building.
Melrose had not brought much, only a couple of largish suitcases with clothes in one, books and CDs in the other, the CDs mostly Mozart and Lou Reed. He had not noticed a stereo system in the house, but he could always go to Penzance and buy one. Maybe he had skinhead inclinations, this love of loud brash music, but probably not, since it was all Lou Reed (or, of course, Mozart); he imagined the skinhead population was far less discriminating.
He lugged the suitcases through the door and set them down. He saw that in the room to the right, drawing room or living room, someone had started a thriving fire whose flames shot straight up the chimney and whose light thrust portentous shadows across the walls.
Who had done this, Esther Laburnum? He doubted it, but she had mentioned a caretaker or gardener; he seemed a more likely person. The fire was such a welcoming touch, a stranger attending to one’s needs.
There was central heating; still, some of the rooms were so large, so cavernous, that the fire gave not only warmth and light but comfort. He took the suitcase of clothes upstairs and disposed of its contents in several dresser drawers in the careless manner that one might do when one hadn’t a Ruthven around to stack perfectly ironed shirts and handkerchiefs in drawers. Melrose did not think of himself as an aesthete, but he admired Ruthven’s aestheticism. Ruthven (and his wife, Martha) established an order that went ticking along, hardly ever a beat missed. One got used to it; one got spoiled, too. Melrose dumped a dozen pairs of socks in one of the drawers where Ruthven would have tucked them in like babies in bassinets. Then he went back downstairs.
He commenced another wander through the house, allowing himself a much slower pace than last time. He went from drawing room to dining room, thence to the library and the little room the agent called a snug and
He was overtaken, as he looked around, by a sense of the familiar. Initially, the house had reminded him of Ardry End; now, it did even more. It was not as large and hadn’t as many rooms, but the feeling was the same. Was he one of those people who, upon venturing into something new, are actually rein-venting something old? A person so attached to the past that whatever path he takes leads back to it, rather like fresh footsteps on a course of already trammeled ground?
He went from the small library to the winding staircase and upward. These rooms he had scarcely glanced at. He looked in on each of five bedrooms gathered round the stairwell: two on each side and one at the front of the house. The bedroom at the front had its own bathroom; the two on each side shared bathrooms. He had stowed his belongings in the first bedroom to the left of the stairs because it gave the best view of the sea, a very dramatic view. Melodramatic, he should say; it depended on who was doing the looking. Thus far in his Cornwall experience, things seemed to be shaping up with melodrama to spare.
The bedrooms were fundamentally the same except for a variation in furnishings and color. He had chosen one with a thick four-poster bed and worn leather easy chair, which he had pulled over to the window and set beside it a glass ashtray on a bronze stand. He designated this room as a smoking room.
The other bedrooms did not yield anything in particular in keeping with his mawkish mood, but upstairs as well as down he was struck by the rooms’ readiness to receive visitors. Satin quilts and counter-panes; books on night tables. (By his own bed, volumes that leaned toward rigorous self-improvement: Emerson, Thoreau, and
In the piano room (which continued to fascinate) he was impressed anew by the sense that someone had left it