‘How d’you do?’ Canon Moran said, stretching out a hand in the direction of an angular youth with a birthmark on his face. His dark hair was cut very short, cropped almost. He was wearing a black leather jacket.
‘I’m fine,’ Harold said.
‘You’ve had a good journey?’
‘Lousy,’ smatter of fact, Mr Moran.’
Harold’s voice was strongly Cockney, and Canon Moran wondered if Deirdre had perhaps picked up some of her English vowel sounds from it. But then he realized that most people in London would speak like that, as people did on the television and the wireless. It was just a little surprising that Harold and Deirdre should have so much in common, as they clearly had from the affectionate way they held one another’s hand. None of the other Moran girls had gone in so much for holding hands in front of the family.
He was to sit in the drawing-room, they insisted, while they made supper in the kitchen, so he picked up the
Having stated that County Wexford looked great, Harold didn’t say much else. He didn’t smile much, either. His afflicted face bore an edgy look, as if he’d never become wholly reconciled to his birthmark. It was like a scarlet map on his left cheek, a shape that reminded Canon Moran of the toe of Italy. Poor fellow, he thought. And yet a birthmark was so much less to bear than other afflictions there could be.
‘Harold’s fascinated actually,’ Deirdre said, ‘by Ireland.’
Her friend didn’t add anything to that remark for a moment, even though Canon Moran smiled and nodded interestedly. Eventually Harold said, ‘The struggle of the Irish people.’
‘I didn’t know a thing about Irish history,’ Deirdre said. ‘I mean, not anything that made sense.’
The conversation lapsed at this point, leaving Canon Moran greatly puzzled. He began to say that Irish history had always been of considerable interest to him also, that it had a good story to it, its tragedy uncomplicated. But the other two didn’t appear to understand what he was talking about and so he changed the subject. It was a particularly splendid autumn, he pointed out.
‘Harold doesn’t go in for anything like that,’ Deirdre replied.
During the days that followed Harold began to talk more, surprising Canon Moran with almost everything he said. Deirdre had been right to say he was fascinated by Ireland, and it wasn’t just a tourist’s fascination. Harold had read widely: he spoke of ancient battles, and of the plantations of James I and Elizabeth, of Robert Emmet and the Mitchelstown martyrs, of Pearse and de Valera. ‘The struggle of the Irish people’ was the expression he most regularly employed. It seemed to Canon Moran that the relationship between Harold and Deirdre had a lot to do with Harold’s fascination, as though his interest in Deirdre’s native land had somehow caused him to become interested in Deirdre herself.
There was something else as well. Fascinated by Ireland, Harold hated his own country. A sneer whispered through his voice when he spoke of England: a degenerate place, he called it, destroyed by class-consciousness and the unjust distribution of wealth. He described in detail the city of Nottingham, to which he appeared to have a particular aversion. He spoke of unnecessary motorways and the stupidity of bureaucracy, the stifling presence of a Royal family. ‘You could keep an Indian village,’ he claimed, ‘on what those corgis eat. You could house five hundred homeless in Buckingham Palace.’ There was brainwashing by television and the newspaper barons. No ordinary person had a chance because pap was fed to the ordinary person, a deliberate policy going back into Victorian times when education and religion had been geared to the enslavement of minds. The English people had brought it on themselves, having lost their spunk, settling instead for consumer durables. ‘What better can you expect,’ Harold demanded, ‘after the hypocrisy of that empire the bosses ran?’
Deirdre didn’t appear to find anything specious in this line of talk, which surprised her father. ‘Oh, I wonder about that,’ he said himself from time to time, but he said it mildly, not wishing to cause an argument, and in any case his interjections were not acknowledged. Quite a few of the criticisms Harold levelled at his own country could be levelled at Ireland also and, Canon Moran guessed, at many countries throughout the world. It was strange that the two neighbouring islands had been so picked out, although once Germany was mentioned and the point made that developments beneath the surface there were a hopeful sign, that a big upset was on the way.
‘We’re taking a walk,’ Harold said one afternoon. ‘She’s going to show me Kinsella’s Barn.’
Canon Moran nodded, saying to himself that he disliked Harold. It was the first time he had admitted it, but the feeling was familiar. The less generous side of his nature had always emerged when his daughters brought to the rectory the men they’d become friendly with or even proposed to marry. Emma, the eldest girl, had brought several before settling in the end for Thomas. Linda had brought only John, already engaged to him. Una had married Carley not long after the death, and Carley had not yet visited the rectory: Canon Moran had met him in Dublin, where the wedding had taken place, for in the circumstances Una had not been married from home. Carley was an older man, an importer of tea and wine, stout and flushed, certainly not someone Canon Moran would have chosen for his second-youngest daughter. But, then, he had thought the same about Emma’s Thomas and about Linda’s John.
Thomas was a farmer, sharing a sizeable acreage with his father in Co. Meath. He always brought to mind the sarcasm of an old schoolmaster who in Canon Moran’s distant schooldays used to refer to a gang of boys at the back of the classroom as ‘farmers’ sons’, meaning that not much could be expected of them. It was an inaccurate assumption but even now, whenever Canon Moran found himself in the company of Thomas, he couldn’t help recalling it. Thomas was mostly silent, with a good-natured smile that came slowly and lingered too long. According to his father, and there was no reason to doubt the claim, he was a good judge of beef cattle.
Linda’s John was the opposite. Wiry and suave, he was making his way in the Bank of Ireland, at present stationed in Waterford. He had a tiny orange-coloured moustache and was good at golf. Linda’s ambition for him was that he should become the Bank of Ireland’s manager in Limerick or Galway, where the insurances that went with the position were particularly lucrative. Unlike Thomas, John talked all the time, telling jokes and stories about the Bank of Ireland’s customers.
‘Nothing is perfect,’ Frances used to say, chiding her husband for an uncharitableness he did his best to combat. He disliked being so particular about the men his daughters chose, and he was aware that other people saw them differently: Thomas would do anything for you, John was fun, the middle-aged Carley laid his success at Una’s feet. But whoever the husbands of his daughters had been, Canon Moran knew he’d have felt the same. He was jealous of the husbands because ever since his daughters had been born he had loved them unstintingly. When he had prayed after Frances’s death he’d felt jealous of God, who had taken her from him.
‘There’s nothing much to see,’ he pointed out when Harold announced that Deirdre was going to show him
