‘The man Kinsella was innocent of everything,’ he heard his voice insisting in his church. ‘He should never have been murdered also.’
Harold would have delighted in the vengeance exacted on an innocent man. Harold wanted to inflict pain, to cause suffering and destruction. The end justified the means for Harold, even if the end was an artificial one, a pettiness grandly dressed up. In his sermon Canon Moran spoke of such matters without mentioning Harold’s name. He spoke of how evil drained people of their humour and compassion, how people pretended even to themselves. It was worse than Frances’s death, he thought as his voice Continued in the church: it was worse that Deirdre should be part of wickedness.
He could tell that his parishioners found his sermon odd, and he didn’t blame them. He was confused, and naturally distressed. In the rectory Deirdre and Harold would be waiting for him. They would all sit down to Sunday lunch while plans for atrocities filled Harold’s mind, while Deirdre loved him.
‘Are you well again, Mrs Davis?’ he inquired at the church door of a woman who suffered from asthma.
‘Not too bad, Canon. Not too bad, thank you.’
He spoke to all the others, inquiring about health, remarking on the beautiful autumn. They were farmers mostly and displayed a farmer’s gratitude for the satisfactory season. He wondered suddenly who’d replace him among them when he retired or died. Father Gowan had had to give up a year ago. The young man, Father White, was always in a hurry.
‘Goodbye so, Canon,’ Mr Willoughby said, shaking hands as he always did, every Sunday. It was a long time since there’d been the trouble about Eugene Dunlevy’s grazing rights; three years ago Mr Willoughby had been left a widower himself. ‘You’re managing all right, Canon?’ he asked, as he also always did.
‘Yes, I’m all right, thank you, Mr Willoughby.’
Someone else inquired if Deirdre was still at the rectory, and he said she was. Heads nodded, the unspoken thought being that that was nice for him, his youngest daughter at home again after all these years. There was forgiveness in several faces, forgiveness of Deirdre, who had been thoughtless to go off to an egg-packing factory. There was the feeling, also unexpressed, that the young were a bit like that.
‘Goodbye,’ he said in a general way. Car doors banged, engines started. In the vestry he removed his surplice and his cassock and hung them in a cupboard.
‘We’ll probably go tomorrow,’ Deirdre said during lunch.
‘Go?’
‘We’ll probably take the Dublin bus.’
‘I’d like to see Dublin,’ Harold said.
‘And then you’re returning to London?’
‘We’re easy about that,’ Harold interjected before Deirdre could reply. ‘I’m a tradesman, Mr Moran, an electrician.’
‘I know you’re an electrician, Harold.’
‘What I mean is, I’m on my own; I’m not answerable to the bosses. There’s always a bob or two waiting in London.’
For some reason Canon Moran felt that Harold was lying. There was a quickness about the way he’d said they were easy about their plans, and it didn’t seem quite to make sense, the logic of not being answerable to bosses and a bob or two always waiting for him. Harold was being evasive about their movements, hiding the fact that they would probably remain in Dublin for longer than he implied, meeting other people like himself.
‘It was good of you to have us,’ Deirdre said that evening, all three of them sitting around the fire in the drawing-room because the evenings had just begun to get chilly. Harold was reading a book about Che Guevara and hadn’t spoken for several hours. ‘We’ve enjoyed it, Father.’
‘It’s been nice having you, Deirdre.’
‘I’ll write to you from London.’
It was safe to say that: he knew she wouldn’t because she hadn’t before, until she’d wanted something. She wouldn’t write to thank him for the rectory’s hospitality, and that would be quite in keeping. Harold was the same kind of man as Sergeant James had been: it didn’t matter that they were on different sides. Sergeant James had maybe borne an affliction also, a humped back or a withered arm. He had ravaged a country that existed then for its spoils, and his most celebrated crime was neatly at hand so that another Englishman could make matters worse by attempting to make amends. In Harold’s view the trouble had always been that these acts of war and murder died beneath the weight of print in history books, and were forgotten. But history could be rewritten, and for that Kinsella’s Barn was an inspiration: Harold had journeyed to it as people make journeys to holy places.
‘Yes?’ Deirdre said, for while these reflections had passed through his mind he had spoken her name, wanting to ask her to tell him the truth about her friend.
He shook his head. ‘I wish you could have seen your mother again,’ he said instead. ‘I wish she were here now.’
The faces of his three sons-in-law irrelevantly appeared in his mind: Carley’s flushed cheeks, Thomas’s slow good-natured smile, John’s little moustache. It astonished him that he’d ever felt suspicious of their natures, for they would never let his daughters down. But Deirdre had turned her back on the rectory, and what could be expected when she came back with a man? She had never been like Emma or Linda or Una, none of whom smoked Three Castles cigarettes and wore clothes that didn’t seem quite clean. It was impossible to imagine any of them becoming involved with a revolutionary, a man who wanted to commit atrocities.
‘He was just a farmer, you know,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Kinsella.’
Surprise showed in Deirdre’s face. ‘It was Mother we were talking about,’ she reminded him, and he could see her trying to connect her mother with a farmer who had died two hundred years ago, and not beirig able to. Elderliness, he could see her thinking. ‘Only time he wandered,’ she would probably say to her friend.
‘It was good of you to come, Deirdre.’
He looked at her, far into her eyes, admitting to himself that she had always been his favourite. When the other girls were busily growing up she had still wanted to sit on his knee. She’d had a way of interrupting him no
