The Collected Stories

‘It’s a great time of year for it,’ he said now, ‘except for the darkness coming in.’

Canon Moran smiled and nodded; the van turned round on the gravel, dust rising behind it as it moved swiftly down the avenue to the road. Everyone said Slattery drove too fast.

He carried the letters to a wooden seat on the edge of the lawn he’d been wondering about cutting. Deirdre’s handwriting hadn’t changed since she’d been a child; it was round and neat, not at all a reflection of the girl she was. The blue English stamp, the Queen in profile blotched a bit by the London postmark, wasn’t on its side or half upside down, as you might possibly expect with Deirdre. Of all the Moran children, she’d grown up to be the only difficult one. She hadn’t come to the funeral and hadn’t written about her mother’s death. She hadn’t been to the rectory for three years.

I’m sorry, she wrote now. I couldn’t stop crying actually. I’ve never known anyone as nice or as generous as she was. For ages I didn’t even want to believe she was dead. I went on imagining her in the rectory and doing the flowers in church and shopping in Enniscorthy.

Deirdre was twenty-one now. He and Frances had hoped she’d go to Trinity and settle down, but although at school she’d seemed to be the cleverest of their children she’d had no desire to become a student. She’d taken the Rosslare boat to Fishguard one night, having said she was going to spend a week with her friend Maeve Coles in Cork. They hadn’t known she’d gone to England until they received a picture postcard from London telling them not to worry, saying she’d found work in an egg-packing factory.

Well, I’m coming back for a little while now, she wrote, if you could put up with me and if you wouldn’t find it too much. I’ll cross over to Rosslare on the 29th, the morning crossing, and then I’ll come on to Enniscorthy on the bus. I don’t know what time it will be but there’s a pub just by where the bus drops you so could we meet in the small bar there at six o’clock and then I won’t have to lug my cases too far? I hope you wont mind going into such a place. If you can’t make it, or don’t want to see me, it’s understandable, so if you don’t turn up by half six I’ll see if I can get a bus on up to Dublin. Only I need to get back to Ireland for a while.

It was, as he and Slattery had agreed, a lovely autumn. Gentle sunshine mellowed the old garden, casting an extra sheen of gold on leaves that were gold already. Roses that had been ebullient in June and July bloomed modestly now. Michaelmas daisies were just beginning to bud. Already the crab-apples were falling, hydrangeas had a forgotten look. Canon Moran carried the letter from his daughter into the walled vegetable garden and leaned against the side of the greenhouse, half sitting on a protruding ledge, reading the letter again. Panes of glass were broken in the greenhouse, white paint and putty needed to be renewed, but inside a vine still thrived, and was heavy now with black ripe fruit. Later that morning he would pick some and drive into Enniscorthy, to sell the grapes to Mrs Neary in Slaney Street.

Love, Deirdre: the letter was marvellous. Beyond the rectory the fields of wheat had been harvested, and the remaining stubble had the same tinge of gold in the autumn light; the beech trees and the chestnuts were triumphantly magnificent. But decay and rotting were only weeks away, and the letter from Deirdre was full of life. ‘Love, Deirdre’ were words more beautiful than all the season’s glories. He prayed as he leaned against the sunny greenhouse, thanking God for this salvation.

For all the years of their marriage Frances had been a help. As a younger man, Canon Moran hadn’t known quite what to do. He’d been at a loss among his parishioners, hesitating in the face of this weakness or that: the pregnancy of Alice Pratt in 1954, the argument about grazing rights between Mr Willoughby and Eugene Dunlevy in 1960, the theft of an altar cloth from St Michael’s and reports that Mrs Tobin had been seen wearing it as a skirt. Alice Pratt had been going out with a Catholic boy, one of Father Gowan’s flock, which made the matter more difficult than ever. Eugene Dunlevy was one of Father Gowan’s also, and so was Mrs Tobin.

‘Father Gowan and I had a chat,’ Frances had said, and she’d had a chat as well with Alice Pratt’s mother. A month later Alice Pratt married the Catholic boy, but to this day attended St Michael’s every Sunday, the children going to Father Gowan. Mrs Tobin was given Hail Marys to say by the priest; Mr Willoughby agreed that his father had years ago granted Eugene Dunlevy the grazing rights. Everything, in these cases and in many others, had come out all right in the end: order emerged from the confusion that Canon Moran so disliked, and it was Frances who had always begun the process, though no one ever said in the rectory that she understood the mystery of people as well as he understood the teachings of the New Testament. She’d been a freckle-faced girl when he’d married her, pretty in her way. He was the one with the brains.

Frances had seen human frailty everywhere: it was weakness in people, she said, that made them what they were as much as strength did. And she herself had her own share of such frailty, falling short in all sorts of ways of the God’s image her husband preached about. With the small amount of housekeeping money she could be allowed she was a spendthrift, and she said she was lazy. She loved clothes and often overreached herself on visits to Dublin; she sat in the sun while the rectory gathered dust and the garden became rank; it was only where people were concerned that she was practical. But for what she was her husband had loved her with unobtrusive passion for fifty years, appreciating her conversation and the help she’d given him because she could so easily sense the truth. When he’d found her dead in the garden one morning he’d felt he had lost some part of himself.

Though many months had passed since then, the trouble was that Frances hadn’t yet become a ghost. Her being alive was still too recent, the shock of her death too raw. He couldn’t distance himself; the past refused to be the past. Often he thought that her fingerprints were still in the rectory, and when he picked the grapes or cut the grass of the lawn it was impossible not to pause and remember other years. Autumn had been her favourite time.

‘Of course I’d come,’ he said. ‘Of course, dear. Of course.’

‘I haven’t treated you very well.’

‘It’s over and done with, Deirdre.’

She smiled, and it was nice to see her smile again, although it was strange to be sitting in the back bar of a public house in Enniscorthy. He saw her looking at him, her eyes passing over his clerical collar and black clothes, and his quiet face. He could feel her thinking that he had aged, and putting it down to the death of the wife he’d been so fond of.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t write,’ she said.

‘You explained in your letter, Deirdre.’

‘It was ages before I knew about it. That was an old address you wrote to.’

‘I guessed.’

In turn he examined her. Years ago she’d had her long hair cut. It was short now, like a black cap on her head. And her face had lost its chubbiness; hollows where her cheeks had been made her eyes more dominant, pools of seaweed green. He remembered her child’s stocky body, and the uneasy adolescence that had spoilt the family’s serenity. Her voice had lost its Irish intonation.

‘I’d have met you off the boat, you know.’