The town was everything in Attracta’s childhood, and only some of it had changed in the fifty years that had passed. Without nostalgia she remembered now the horses and carts with milk-churns for the creamery, slowly progressing on narrow streets between colour-washed houses. On fair-days the pavements had been slithery with dung, and on fair-days they still were. Farmers stood by their animals, their shirts clean for the occasion, a stud at their throats, without collar or tie. Dogs slouched in a manner that was characteristic of the dogs of the town; there was a smell of stout and sawdust. In her childhood there had been O’Mara’s Picture House, dour grey cement encasing the dreamland of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Built with pride in 1929, O’Mara’s was a ruin now.
Within the world of the town there was for Attracta a smaller, Protestant world. Behind green railings there was Mr Ayrie’s Protestant schoolroom. There was the Church of Ireland church, with its dusty flags of another age, and Archdeacon Flower’s prayers for the English royal family. There were the Sunday-school classes of Mr and Mrs Dell, and the patience of her aunt, which seemed like a Protestant thing also – the Protestant duty of a woman who had, never expected to find herself looking after a child. There was Mr Devereux, a Protestant who never went to church.
No one in the town, not even her aunt, was kinder to Attracta than Mr Devereux. On her birthday he came himself to the house in North Street with a present carefully wrapped, a doll’s house once, so big he’d had to ask the man next door to help him out of the dickey of his motor-car with it. At Christmas he had a Christmas tree in his house, and other children in the town, her friends from school, were invited to a party. Every Saturday she spent the afternoon with him, eating his housekeeper’s delicious orange cake for tea and sticking stamps into the album he’d given her, listening to his gramophone in the room he called his office. He loved getting a huge fire going in his office, banking up the coals so that they’d glow and redden her cheeks. In summer he sat in his back garden with her, sometimes reading
His house was quiet and always a little mysterious. The drawing-room, full of looming furniture, was dark in the daytime. Behind layers of curtains that hung to the ground, blue blinds obscured the greater part of the light: sunshine would damage the furniture, Mr Devereux’s housekeeper used to say. On a summer’s afternoon this woman would light a paraffin lamp so that she could polish the mahogany surfaces of the tables and the grand piano. Her name was Geraldine Carey: she added to the house’s mystery.
Mr Devereux’s smile was slow. There was a laziness about it, both in its leisurely arrival and the way it lingered. His eyes had a weary look, quite out of keeping with all the efforts he made to promote his friendship with Attracta and her aunt. Yet the efforts seemed natural to Attracta, as were the efforts of Geraldine Carey, who was the quietest person Attracta had ever met. She spoke in a voice that was often hard to hear. Her hair was as black as coal, drawn back from her face and arranged in a coiled bun at the back of her head. Her eyes were startlingly alive, seeming to be black also, often cast down. She had the kind of beauty that Attracta would like one day to possess herself, but knew she would not. Geraldine Carey was like a nun because of the dark clothes she wore, and she had a nun’s piety. In the town it was said she couldn’t go to Mass often enough. ‘Why weren’t you a nun, Geraldine?’ Attracta asked her once, watching her making bread in her big, cool kitchen. The habit would have suited her, she added, already imagining the housekeeper’s face framed by the coif, and the black voluminous skirts. But Geraldine Carey replied that she’d never heard God calling her. ‘Only the good are called,’ she said.
There’d been a time, faintly remembered by Attracta, when her Aunt Emmeline hadn’t been well disposed towards Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. There’d been suspicion of some kind, a frowning over the presents he brought, an agitation whenever Attracta was invited to tea. Because of her own excitement over the presents and the invitations Attracta hadn’t paid much attention to the nature of her aunt’s concern, and looking back on it years later could only speculate. Her Aunt Emmeline was a precise person, a tall woman who had never married, reputed to be delicate. Her house in North Street, very different from Mr Devereux’s, reflected her: it was neat as a new pin, full of light, the windows of its small rooms invariably open at the top to let in fresh air. The fanlight above the hall door was always gleaming, filling the hall with morning sunlight. Attracta’s Aunt Emmeline had a fear of dankness, of damp clothes and wet feet, and rain falling on the head. She worried about lots of things.
Clearly she had worried about Mr Devereux. There was an occasion when Archdeacon Flower had been specially invited to tea, when Attracta had listened at the sitting-room door because she’d sensed from her aunt’s flustered manner that something important was to be discussed. ‘Oh, have no worry in that direction at all,’ she heard the Archdeacon say. ‘Gentle as a lamb that man’s become.’ Her aunt asked a question Attracta could not hear because of the sound of a teacup being replaced on a saucer. ‘He’s doing the best he can,’ the Archdeacon continued, ‘according to his lights.’ Her aunt mentioned Geraldine Carey, and again the Archdeacon reassured her. ‘Bygones are bygones,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it a remarkable thing when a man gets caught in his own snare?’ He commented on the quality of her aunt’s fruitcake, and then said that everyone should be charitably disposed towards Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. He believed, he said, that that was God’s Wish.
After that, slowly over the years, Attracta’s aunt began to think more highly of Mr Devereux, until in the end there was no one in the entire town, with the possible exception of Archdeacon Flower, whom she held in greater esteem. Once when MacQuilly the coal merchant insisted that she hadn’t paid for half a ton of coal and she recollected perfectly giving the money to the man who’d delivered it, Mr Devereux had come to her aid. ‘A right old devil, MacQuilly is,’ Attracta heard him saying in the hall, and that was the end her aunt had ever heard of the matter. On Saturday evenings, having kept Attracta company on her walk home, Mr Devereux might remain for a little while in the house in North Street. He sometimes brought lettuces or cuttings with him, or tomatoes or strawberries. He would take a glass of sherry in the trim little sitting-room with its delicate inlaid chairs that matched the delicacy of Attracta’s aunt. Often he’d still be there, taking a second glass, when Attracta came down to say goodnight. Her aunt’s cat, Diggory, liked to climb up on to his knees, and as if in respect of some kind Mr Devereux never lit his pipe. He and her aunt would converse in low voices and generally they’d cease when Attracta entered the room. She would kiss him good-night after she’d kissed her aunt. She imagined it was what having a father was like.
At the town’s approximate centre there stood a grey woman on a pedestal, a statue of the Maid of Erin. It was here, only yards from this monument, that Mr Purce told Attracta the truth about her parents’ death, when she was eleven. She’d always had the feeling that Mr Purce wanted to speak to her, even that he was waiting until she could understand what it was he had to say. He was a man people didn’t much like; he’d settled in the town, having come there from somewhere else. He was a clerk in the courthouse.
‘There’s a place I know where there’s greenfinches,’ he said, as if introducing himself. ‘Ten nests of them, maybe twelve, maybe more. D’you understand me, Attracta? Would you like me to show you?’
She was on her way home from school. She had to get back to do her homework, she said to Mr Purce. She didn’t want to go looking for greenfinches with him.
‘Did Devereux tell you not to talk to Mr Purce?’ he said, and she shook her head. As far as she could remember, Mr Devereux had never mentioned Mr Purce. ‘I see you in church,’ Mr Purce said.
She had seen him too, sitting in the front, over on the lefthand side. Her aunt had often remarked that the day
