he’d found a nail in his egg or how Ita had put mint sauce into a jug with milk in it – she never laughed, and looked at him in surprise when he laughed himself. But Dr Foran said it was best to keep her cheered up.
All during that year Francis talked to her about his forthcoming visit to the Holy Land, endeavouring to make her understand that for a fortnight next spring he would be away from the house and the shop. He’d been away before for odd days, but that was when she’d been younger. He used to visit an aunt in Tralee, but three years ago the aunt had died and he hadn’t left the town since.
Francis and his mother had always been close. Before his birth two daughters had died in infancy, and his very survival had often struck Mrs Conary as a gift. He had always been her favourite, the one among her children whom she often considered least able to stand on his own two feet. It was just like Paul to have gone blustering off to San Francisco instead of remaining in Co. Tipperary. It was just like Kitty to have married a useless man. ‘There’s not a girl in the town who’d touch him,’ she’d said to her daughter at the time, but Kitty had been headstrong and adamant, and there was My les now, doing nothing whatsoever except cleaning other people’s windows for a pittance and placing bets in Donovan’s the turf accountant’s. It was the shop and the arrangement Kitty had with Francis and her mother that kept her and the children going, three of whom had already left the town, which in Mrs Conary’s opinion they mightn’t have done if they’d had a better type of father. Mrs Conary often wondered what her own two babies who’d died might have grown up into, and imagined they might have been like Francis, about whom she’d never had a moment’s worry. Not in a million years would he give you the feeling that he was too big for his boots, like Paul sometimes did with his lavishness and his big talk of America. He wasn’t silly like Kitty, or so sinful you couldn’t forgive him, the way you couldn’t forgive Edna, even though she was dead and buried in Toronto.
Francis understood how his mother felt about the family. She’d had a hard life, left a widow early on, trying to do the best she could for everyone. In turn he did his best to compensate for the struggles and disappointments she’d suffered, cheering her in the evenings while Kitty and Myles and the youngest of their children watched the television in the kitchen. His mother had ignored the existence of Myles for ten years, ever since the day he’d taken money out of the till to pick up the odds on Gusty Spirit at Phoenix Park. And although Francis got on well enough with Myles he quite understood that there should be a long aftermath to that day. There’d been a terrible row in the kitchen, Kitty screaming at Myles and Myles telling lies and Francis trying to keep them calm, saying they’d give the old woman a heart attack.
She didn’t like upsets of any kind, so all during the year before he was to visit the Holy Land Francis read the New Testament to her in order to prepare her. He talked to her about Bethlehem and Nazareth and the miracle of the loaves and fishes and all the other miracles. She kept nodding, but he often wondered if she didn’t assume he was just casually referring to episodes in the Bible. As a child he had listened to such talk himself, with awe and fascination, imagining the walking on the water and the temptation in the wilderness. He had imagined the cross carried to Calvary, and the rock rolled back from the tomb, and the rising from the dead on the third day. That he was now to walk in such places seemed extraordinary to him, and he wished his mother was younger so that she could appreciate his good fortune and share it with him when she received the postcards he intended, every day, to send her. But her eyes seemed always to tell him that he was making a mistake, that somehow he was making a fool of himself by doing such a showy thing as going to the Holy Land.
It was the first time Francis had been in an aeroplane. He flew by Aer Lingus from Dublin to London and then changed to an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. He was nervous and he found it exhausting. All the time he seemed to be eating, and it was strange being among so many people he didn’t know. ‘You will taste honey such as never before,’ an Israeli businessman in the seat next to his assured him. ‘And Galilean figs. Make certain to taste Galilean figs.’ Make certain too, the businessman went on, to experience Jerusalem by night and in the early dawn. He urged Francis to see places he had never heard of, Yad Va-Shem, the treasures of the Shrine of the Book. He urged him to honour the martyrs of Masada and to learn a few words of Hebrew as a token of respect. He told him of a shop where he could buy mementoes and warned him against Arab street traders.
‘The hard man, how are you?’ Father Paul said at Tel Aviv airport, having flown in from San Francisco the day before. Father Paul had had a drink or two and he suggested another when they arrived at the Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem. It was half past nine in the evening. ‘A quick little nightcap,’ Father Paul insisted, ‘and then hop into bed with you, Francis.’ They sat in an enormous open lounge with low, round tables and square modern armchairs. Father Paul said it was the bar.
They had said what had to be said in the car from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Father Paul had asked about their mother, and Kitty and Myles. He’d asked about other people in the town, old Canon Mahon and Sergeant Murray. He and Father Steigmuller had had a great year of it, he reported: as well as everything else, the boys’ home had turned out two tip-top footballers. ‘We’ll start on a tour at half-nine in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll be sitting having breakfast at eight.’
Francis went to bed and Father Paul ordered another whisky, with ice. To his great disappointment there was no Irish whiskey in the hotel so he’d had to content himself with Haig. He fell into conversation with an American couple, making them promise that if they were ever in Ireland they wouldn’t miss out Co. Tipperary. At eleven o’clock the barman said he was wanted at the reception desk and when Father Paul went there and announced himself he was given a message in an envelope. It was a telegram that had come, the girl said in poor English. Then she shook her head, saying it was a telex. He opened the envelope and learnt that Mrs Conary had died.
Francis fell asleep immediately and dreamed that he was a boy again, out fishing with a friend whom he couldn’t now identify.
On the telephone Father Paul ordered whisky and ice to be brought to his room. Before drinking it he took his jacket off and knelt by his bed to pray for his mother’s salvation. When he’d completed the prayers he walked slowly up and down the length of the room, occasionally sipping at his whisky. He argued with himself and finally arrived at a decision.
For breakfast they had scrambled eggs that looked like yellow ice- cream, and orange juice that was delicious. Francis wondered about bacon, but Father Paul explained that bacon was not readily available in Israel.
‘Did you sleep all right?’ Father Paul inquired. ‘Did you have the jet-lag?’
‘Jet-lag?’
‘A tiredness you get after jet flights. It’d knock you out for days.’
‘Ah, I slept great, Paul.’
‘Good man.’
They lingered over breakfast. Father Paul reported a little more of what had happened in his parish during the year, in particular about the two young footballers from the boys’ home. Francis told about the decline in the cooking at Mrs Shea’s boarding-house, as related to him by the three Christian Brothers. ‘I have a car laid on,’ Father Paul said, and twenty minutes later they walked out into the Jerusalem sunshine.
The hired car stopped on the way to the walls of the Old City. It drew into a lay-by at Father Paul’s request and the two men got out and looked across a wide valley dotted with houses and olive trees. A road curled along the distant slope opposite. ‘The Mount of Olives,’ Father Paul said. ‘And that’s the road to Jericho.’ He pointed
