‘Yes, perhaps I’d better go,’ Torridge said.
With impatience Mrs Mace-Hamilton looked at her husband, as if expecting him to hurry Torridge off or at least to say something. But Mace-Hamilton remained silent. Mrs Mace-Hamilton licked her lips, preparing to speak herself. She changed her mind.
‘Fisher didn’t go into a timber business,’ Torridge said, ‘because poor old Fisher was dead as a doornail. Which is why our cretin of a headmaster, Mrs Mace-Hamilton, had that Assembly.’
‘Assembly?’ she said. Her voice was weak, although she’d meant it to sound matter-of-fact and angry.
‘There was an Assembly that no one understood. Poor old Fisher had strung himself up in a barn on his father’s farm. I discovered that,’ Torridge said, turning to Arrowsmith, ‘years later: from God Harvey actually. The poor chap left a note but the parents didn’t care to pass it on. I mean it was for you, Arrows.’
Arrowsmith was still standing, hanging over the table. ‘Note?’ he said. ‘For me?’
‘Another note. Why d’you think he did himself in, Arrows?’
Torridge smiled, at Arrowsmith and then around the table.
‘None of that’s true,’ Wiltshire said.
‘As a matter of fact it is.’
He went, and nobody spoke at the dinner table. A body of a schoolboy hung from a beam in a barn, a note on the straw below his dangling feet. It hung in the confusion that had been caused, increasing the confusion. Two waiters hovered by a sideboard, one passing the time by arranging sauce bottles, the other folding napkins into cone shapes. Slowly Arrowsmith sat down again. The silence continued as the conversation of Torridge continued to haunt the dinner table. He haunted it himself, with his brittle smile and his tap-dancer’s elegance, still faithful to the past in which he had so signally failed, triumphant in his middle age.
Then Mrs Arrowsmith quite suddenly wept and the Wiltshire twins wept and Mrs Wiltshire comforted them. The Arrowsmith girl got up and walked away, and Mrs Mace-Hamilton turned to the three men and said they should be ashamed of themselves, allowing all this to happen.
‘Till then,’ Father Paul said, leaning out of the train window. ‘Till Jerusalem, Francis.’
‘Please God, Paul.’ As he spoke the Dublin train began to move and his brother waved from the window and he waved back, a modest figure on the platform. Everyone said Francis might have been a priest as well, meaning that Francis’s quietness and meditative disposition had an air of the cloister about them. But Francis contented himself with the running of Conary’s hardware business, which his mother had run until she was too old for it. ‘Are we game for the Holy Land next year?’ Father Paul had asked that July. ‘Will we go together, Francis?’ He had brushed aside all Francis’s protestations, all attempts to explain that the shop could not be left, that their mother would be confused by the absence of Francis from the house. Rumbustiously he’d pointed out that there was their sister Kitty, who was in charge of the household of which Francis and their mother were part and whose husband, Myles, could surely be trusted to look after the shop for a single fortnight. For thirty years, ever since he was seven, Francis had wanted to go to the Holy Land. He had savings which he’d never spent a penny of: you couldn’t take them with you, Father Paul had more than once stated that July.
On the platform Francis watched until the train could no longer, be seen, his thoughts still with his brother. The priest’s ruddy countenance smiled again behind cigarette smoke; his bulk remained impressive in his clerical clothes, the collar pinching the flesh of his neck, his black shoes scrupulously polished. There were freckles on the backs of his large, Strong hands; he had a fine head of hair, grey and crinkly. In an hour and a half’s time the train would creep into Dublin, and he’d take a taxi. He’d spend a night in the Gresham Hotel, probably falling in with another priest, having a drink or two, maybe playing a game of bridge after his meal. That was his brother’s way and always had been – an extravagant, easy kind of way, full of smiles and good humour. It was what had taken him to America and made him successful there. In order to raise money for the church that he and Father Steigmuller intended to build before 1980 he took parties of the well-to-do from San Francisco to Rome and Florence, to Chartres and Seville and the Holy Land. He was good at raising money, not just for the church but for the boys’ home of which he was president, and for the Hospital of Our Saviour, and for St. Mary’s Old People’s Home on the west side of the city. But every July he flew back to Ireland, to the town in Co. Tipperary where his mother and brother and sister still lived. He stayed in the house above the shop which he might have inherited himself on the death of his father, which he’d rejected in favour of the religious life. Mrs Conary was eighty now. In the shop she sat silently behind the counter, in a corner by the chicken-wire, wearing only clothes that were black. In the evenings she sat with Francis in the lace-curtained sitting-room, while the rest of the family occupied the kitchen. It was for her sake most of all that Father Paul made the journey every summer, considering it his duty.
Walking back to the town from the station, Francis was aware that he was missing his brother. Father Paul was fourteen years older and in childhood had often taken the place of their father, who had died when Francis was five. His brother had possessed an envied strength and knowledge; he’d been a hero, quite often worshipped, an example of success. In later life he had become an example of generosity as well: ten years ago he’d taken their mother to Rome, and their sister Kitty and her husband two years later; he’d paid the expenses when their sister Edna had gone to Canada; he’d assisted two nephews to make a start in America. In childhood Francis hadn’t possessed his brother’s healthy freckled face, just as in middle age he didn’t have his ruddy complexion and his stoutness and his easiness with people. Francis was slight, his sandy hair receding, his face rather pale. His breathing was sometimes laboured because of wheeziness in the chest. In the ironmonger’s shop he wore a brown cotton coat.
‘Hullo, Mr Conary,’ a woman said to him in the main street of the town. ‘Father Paul’s gone off, has he?’
‘Yes, he’s gone again.’
‘I’ll pray for his journey so,’ the woman promised, and Francis thanked her.
A year went by. In San Francisco another wing of the boys’ home was completed, another target was reached in Father Paul and Father Steigmuller’s fund for the church they planned to have built by 1980. In the town in Co. Tipperary there were baptisms and burial services and First Communions. Old Loughlin, a farmer from Bansha, died in McSharry’s grocery and bar, having gone there to celebrate a good price he’d got for a heifer. Clancy, from behind the counter in Doran’s drapery, married Maureen Talbot; Mr Nolan’s plasterer married Miss Carron; Johneen Meagher married Seamus in the chip-shop, under pressure from her family to do so. A local horse, from the stables on the Limerick road, was said to be an entry for the Fairy house Grand National, but it turned out not to be true. Every evening of that year Francis sat with his mother in the lace-curtained sitting-room above the shop. Every weekday she sat in her corner by the chicken-wire, watching while he counted out screws and weighed staples, or advised about yard brushes or tap-washers. Occasionally, on a Saturday, he visited the three Christian Brothers who lodged with Mrs Shea and afterwards he’d tell his mother about how the authority was slipping these days from the nuns and the Christian Brothers, and how Mrs Shea’s elderly maid, Ita, couldn’t see to cook the food any more. His mother would nod and hardly ever speak. When he told a joke – what young Hogan had said when
