He stared at her. She should have sent him away all the same, she said, she should have sent him off to play with other children; and in time she should have urged him to embark on a friendship with a girl.
He stood up. ‘That’s a nice little piece you composed for me,’ Father Finn had said, and he saw again the priest’s face as he spoke those words, seeing it differently now. He saw his Aunt Roche’s differently also, with anxiety twitching in it as the priest murmured his praise and his encouragement, both of them fearful for the safety of their Wednesday and Sunday afternoons.
‘Don’t go, Justin. Don’t go.’
But there was no point in staying, any more than there was a point in saying he would end by marrying Thomasina Durcan. His Aunt Roche, who had seemed to understand so much, wouldn’t understand that such things happened when you had nothing to keep you going. He had thought the world of her, just as he had of Father Finn, but she wouldn’t understand if he said that in time he would acquire his father’s bonhomie, even his popularity with the drapers of the provinces. A woman like Miss Murphy might enter his life, or a woman like Mrs Keane.
He did not look again at the frail presence in the room he had come to know so well. She cried out at him, only repeating that she’d had to tell the truth, that the truth was more important than anything. She caught at the sleeve of his jacket, begging him to forgive her for the past. He pushed her hand away, and swore at her before he went.
Nothing as appalling had happened before at Drimaghleen; its people had never been as shocked. They’d had their share of distress, like any people; there were memories of dramatic occurrences; stories from a more distant past were told. In the 1880s a woman known as the Captain’s wife had run away with a hunchbacked pedlar. In 1798 there’d been resistance in the hills and fighting in Drimaghleen itself. During the Troubles a local man had been executed in a field by the Black and Tans. But no story, and no long memory, could match the horror of the tragedy that awaited the people of Drimaghleen on 22 May 1985, a Wednesday morning.
The McDowds, that morning, awoke in their farmhouse and began the day as they always did, McDowd pulling on his shirt and trousers and lifting down a black overcoat from the pegs beside the kitchen door. He fastened it with a length of string which he kept in one of its pockets, found his socks in his gum-boots and went out with his two sheepdogs to drive the cows in for milking. His wife washed herself, put the kettle on the stove, and knocked on her daughter’s door. ‘Maureen!’ she called. ‘Come on now, Maureen!’
It was not unusual that Maureen failed to reply. Mrs McDowd re-entered her bedroom and dressed herself. ‘Get up out of that, Maureen!’ she shouted, banging again on her daughter’s door. ‘Are you sick?’ she inquired, puzzled now by the lack of movement from within the room: always at this second rousing Maureen yawned or spoke. ‘Maureen!’ she shouted again, and then opened the door.
McDowd, calling in the cattle, was aware that there had been something wrong in the yard as he’d passed through it, but an early-morning torpor hindered the progression of his thoughts when he endeavoured to establish what it was. His wife’s voice shouting across the field at him, and his daughter’s name used repeatedly in the information that was being inadequately conveyed to him, jolted him into an awareness that what had been wrong was that Maureen’s bicycle had not been leaning against the kitchen window-sill. ‘Maureen hasn’t come back,’ his wife repeated again when he was close enough to hear her. ‘She’s not been in her bed.’
The cows were milked because no matter what the reason for Maureen’s absence they had to be. The breakfast was placed on the kitchen table because no good would come of not taking food. McDowd, in silence, ate with an appetite that was unaffected; his wife consumed less than usual. ‘We will drive over,’ he said when they had finished, anger thickening his voice.
She nodded. She’d known as soon as she’d seen the unused bed that they would have to do something. They could not just wait for a letter to arrive, or a telegram, or whatever it was their daughter had planned. They would drive over to the house where Lancy Butler lived with his mother, the house to which their daughter had cycled the evening before. They did not share the thought that possessed both of them: that their, daughter had taken the law into her own hands and gone off with Lancy Butler, a spoilt and useless man.
McDowd was a tallish, spare man of sixty-two, his face almost gaunt, grey hair ragged on his head. His wife, two years younger, was thin also, with gnarled features and the hands of a woman who all her life had worked in the fields. They did not say much to one another, and never had; but they did not quarrel either. On the farm, discussion was rarely apt, there being no profit in it; it followed naturally that grounds for disagreement were limited. Five children had been born to the McDowds; Maureen was the youngest and the only one who had remained at home. Without a show of celebration, for that was not the family way, her twenty-fifth birthday had passed by a month ago.
‘Put your decent trousers on,’ Mrs McDowd urged. ‘You can’t go like that.’
‘I’m all right the way I am.’
She knew he would not be persuaded and did not try, but instead hurried back to her bedroom to change her shoes. At least he wouldn’t drive over in the overcoat with the string round it: that was only for getting the cows in from the field when the mornings were cold. He’d taken it off before he’d sat down to his breakfast and there would be no cause to put it on again. She covered up her own old skirt and jumper with her waterproof.
‘The little bitch,’ he said in the car, and she said nothing.
They both felt the same, anxious and cross at the same time, not wanting to believe the apparent truth. Their daughter had ungratefully deceived them: again in silence the thought was shared while he drove the four miles to the Butlers’ house. When they turned off the tarred road into a lane, already passing between the Butlers’ fields, they heard the dog barking. The window of the Volkswagen on Mrs McDowd’s side wouldn’t wind up, due to a defect that had developed a month ago: the shrill barking easily carried above the rattle of the engine.
That was that, they thought, listening to the dog. Maureen and Lancy had gone the night before, and Mrs Butler couldn’t manage the cows on her own. No wonder the old dog was beside himself. Bitterly, McDowd called his daughter a bitch again, though only to himself. Lancy Butler, he thought, my God! Lancy Butler would lead her a dance, and lead her astray, and lead her down into the gutters of some town. He’d warned her a thousand times about Lancy Butler. He’d told her the kind of fool he was.
‘His father was a decent man,’ he said, breaking at last the long silence. ‘Never touched a drop.’
‘The old mother ruined him.’
It wouldn’t last long, they both thought. Lancy Butler might marry her, or he might wriggle out of it. But however it turned out she’d be back in six months’ time or at any rate a year’s. There’d probably be a baby to bring up.
The car turned into the yard, and neither McDowd nor his wife immediately saw their daughter lying beside
