‘I didn’t want to bother you with that.’
‘Oh, now, it isn’t far, Deirdre.’
She drank Irish whiskey, and smoked a brand of cigarettes called Three Castles. He’d asked for a mineral himself, and the woman serving them had brought him a bottle of something that looked like water but which fizzed up when she’d poured it. A kind of lemonade he imagined it was, and didn’t much care for it.
‘I have grapes for Mrs Neary,’ he said.
‘Who’s that?’
‘She has a shop in Slaney Street. We always sold her the grapes. You remember?’
She didn’t, and he reminded her of the vine in the greenhouse. A shop surely wouldn’t be open at this hour of the evening, she said, forgetting that in a country town of course it would be. She asked if the cinema was still the same in Enniscorthy, a cement building halfway up a hill. She said she remembered bicycling home from it at night with her sisters, not being able to keep up with them. She asked after her sisters and he told her about the two marriages that had taken place since she’d left: she had in-laws she’d never met, and nephews and a niece.
They left the bar, and he drove his dusty black Vauxhall straight to the small shop he’d spoken of. She remained in the car while he carried into the shop two large chip-baskets full of grapes. Afterwards Mrs Neary came to the door with him.
‘Well, is that Deirdre?’ she said as Deirdre wound down the window of the car. ‘I’d never know you, Deirdre.’
‘She’s come back for a little while,’ Canon Moran explained, raising his voice a little because he was walking round the car to the driver’s seat as he spoke.
‘Well, isn’t that grand?’ said Mrs Neary.
Everyone in Enniscorthy knew Deirdre had just gone off, but it didn’t matter now. Mrs Neary’s husband, who was a red-cheeked man with a cap, much smaller than his wife, appeared beside her in the shop doorway. He inclined his head in greeting, and Deirdre smiled and waved at both of them. Canon Moran thought it was pleasant when she went on waving while he drove off.
In the rectory he lay wakeful that night, his mind excited by Deirdre’s presence. He would have loved Frances to know, and guessed that she probably did. He fell asleep at half past two and dreamed that he and Frances were young again, that Deirdre was still a baby. The freckles on Frances’s face were out in profusion, for they were sitting in the sunshine in the garden, tea things spread about them, the children playing some game among the shrubs. It was autumn then also, the last of the September heat. But because he was younger in his dream he didn’t feel part of the season himself, or sense its melancholy.
A week went by. The time passed slowly because a lot was happening, or so it seemed. Deirdre insisted on cooking all the meals and on doing the shopping in Boharbawn’s single shop or in Enniscorthy. She still smoked her endless cigarettes, but the peakiness there had been in her face when she’d first arrived wasn’t quite so pronounced – or perhaps, he thought, he’d become used to it. She told him about the different jobs she’d had in London and the different places she’d lived in, because on the postcards she’d occasionally sent there hadn’t been room to go into detail. In the rectory they had always hoped she’d managed to get a training of some sort, though guessing she hadn’t. In fact, her jobs had been of the most rudimentary kind: as well as her spell in the egg-packing factory, there’d been a factory that made plastic earphones, a cleaning job in a hotel near Euston, and a year working for the Use-Us Office Cleansing Service. ‘But you can’t have liked any of that work, Deirdre?’ he suggested, and she agreed she hadn’t.
From the way she spoke he felt that that period of her life Was over: adolescence was done with, she had steadied and taken stock. He didn’t suggest to her that any of this might be so, not wishing to seem either too anxious or too pleased, but he felt she had returned to the rectory in a very different frame of mind from the one in which she’d left it. He imagined she would remain for quite a while, still taking stock, and in a sense occupying her mother’s place. He thought he recognized in her a loneliness that matched his own, and he wondered if it was a feeling that their loneliness might be shared which had brought her back at this particular time. Sitting in the drawing-room while she cooked or washed up, or gathering grapes in the greenhouse while she did the shopping, he warmed delightedly to this theme. It seemed like an act of God that their circumstances should interlace this autumn. By Christmas she would know what she wanted to do with her life, and in the spring that followed she would perhaps be ready to set forth again. A year would have passed since the death of Frances.
‘I have a friend,’ Deirdre said when they were having a cup of coffee together in the middle of one morning. ‘Someone who’s been good to me.’
She had carried a tray to where he was composing next week’s sermon, sitting on the wooden seat by the lawn at the front of the house. He laid aside his exercise book, and a pencil and a rubber. ‘Who’s that?’ he inquired.
‘Someone called Harold.’
He nodded, stirring sugar into his coffee.
‘I want to tell you about Harold, Father. I want you to meet him.’
‘Yes, of course.’
She lit a cigarette. She said, ‘We have a lot in common. I mean, he’s the only person…’
She faltered and then hesitated. She lifted her cigarette to her lips and drew on it.
He said, ‘Are you fond of him, Deirdre?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Another silence gathered. She smoked and drank her coffee. He added more sugar to his.
‘Of course I’d like to meet him,’ he said.
‘Could he come to stay with us, Father? Would you mind? Would it be all right?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. I’d be delighted.’
Harold was summoned, and arrived at Rosslare a few days later. In the meantime Deirdre had explained to her father that her friend was an electrician by trade and had let it fall that he was an intellectual kind of person. She borrowed the old Vauxhall and drove it to Rosslare to meet him, returning to the rectory in the early evening.
