‘We can’t stay here if she’s dead.’
It was this, Father Paul realized, he’d been afraid of when he’d argued with himself and made his plan. If he had knocked on Francis’s door the night before, Francis would have wanted to return immediately without seeing a single stone of the land he had come so far to be moved by.
‘We could go straight up to Galilee in the morning,’ Father Paul said quietly. ‘You’ll find comfort in Galilee, Francis.’
But Francis shook his head. ‘I want to be with her,’ he said.
Father Paul lit another cigarette. He nodded at a hovering waiter, indicating his need of another drink. He said to himself that he must keep his cool, an expression he was fond of.
‘Take it easy, Francis,’ he said.
‘Is there a plane out in the morning? Can we make arrangements now?’ He looked about him as if for a member of the hotel staff who might be helpful.
‘No good’ll be done by tearing off home, Francis. What’s wrong with Sunday?’
‘I want to be with her.’
Anger swelled within Father Paul. If he began to argue his words would become slurred: he knew that from experience. He must keep his cool and speak slowly and clearly, making a few simple points. It was typical of her, he thought, to die inconveniently.
‘You’ve come all this way,’ he said as slowly as he could without sounding peculiar. ‘Why cut it any shorter than we need? We’ll be losing a week anyway. She wouldn’t want us to go back.’
‘I think she would.’
He was right in that. Her possessiveness in her lifetime would have reached out across a dozen continents for Francis. She’d known what she was doing by dying when she had.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ Francis said. ‘She didn’t want me to come.’
‘You’re thirty-seven years of age, Francis.’
‘I did wrong to come.’
‘You did no such thing.’
The time he’d taken her to Rome she’d been difficult for the whole week, complaining about the food, saying everywhere was dirty. Whenever he’d spent anything she’d disapproved. All his life, Father Paul felt, he’d done his best for her. He had told her before anyone else when he’d decided to enter the priesthood, certain that she’d be pleased. ‘I thought you’d take over the shop,’ she’d said instead.
‘What difference could it make to wait, Francis?’
‘There’s nothing to wait for.’
As long as he lived Francis knew he would never forgive himself. As long as he lived he would say to himself that he hadn’t been able to wait a few years, until she’d passed quietly on. He might even have been in the room with her when it happened.
‘It was a terrible thing not to tell me,’ he said. ‘I sat down and wrote her a postcard, Paul. I bought her a plate.’
‘So you said.’
‘You’re drinking too much of that whisky.’
‘Now, Francis, don’t be silly.’
‘You’re half drunk and she’s lying there.’
‘She can’t be brought back no matter what we do.’
‘She never hurt anyone,’ Francis said.
Father Paul didn’t deny that, although it wasn’t true. She had hurt their sister Kitty, constantly reproaching her for marrying the man she had, long after Kitty was aware she’d made a mistake. She’d driven Edna to Canada after Edna, still unmarried, had had a miscarriage that only the family knew about. She had made a shadow out of Francis although Francis didn’t know it. Failing to hold on to her other children, she had grasped her youngest to her, as if she had borne him to destroy him.
‘It’ll be you who’ll say a Mass for her?’ Francis said.
‘Yes, of course it will.’
‘You should have told me.’
Francis realized why, all day, he’d been disappointed. From the moment when the hired car had pulled into the lay-by and his brother had pointed across the valley at the Garden of Gethsemane he’d been disappointed and had not admitted it. He’d been disappointed in the Via Dolorosa and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and in Bethlehem. He remembered the bespectacled man who’d kept saying that you couldn’t be sure about anything. All the people with cameras made it impossible to think, all the jostling and pushing was distracting. When he’d said there’d been too much to take in he’d meant something different.
‘Her death got in the way,’ he said.
‘What d’you mean, Francis?’
‘It didn’t feel like Jerusalem, it didn’t feel like Bethlehem.’
‘But it is, Francis, it is.’
