There was confusion now in Drimaghleen, in Kilmona and Mountcroe; and confusion, Father Sallins believed, was insidious. People had been separated from their instinct, and other newspaper articles would follow upon this one. More strangers would come. Father Sallins imagined a film being made about Maureen McDowd, and the mystery that had been created becoming a legend. The nature of Maureen McDowd would be argued over, books would be written because all of it was fascinating. For ever until they died her mother and her father would blame themselves for taking the money their poverty had been unable to turn away.
‘The family’ll see the pictures.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, Mrs McDowd.’
‘No one ever said she was close to being a saint. That was never said, Father.’
‘I know, I know.’
Mrs McDowd covered her face with her hands. Her thin shoulders heaved beneath the pain of her distress; sobs wrenched at her body. Too much had happened to her, the priest thought; it was too much for any mother that her murdered daughter should be accused of murder herself in order to give newspaper-readers something to think about. Her husband had turned away from the table she sat at. He stood with his back to her, looking out into the yard. In a low, exhausted voice he said:
‘What kind of people are they?’
The priest slowly shook his head, unable to answer that, and in the kitchen that looked different in Jeremiah Tyler’s photograph Mrs McDowd screamed. She sat at the blue-topped table with her lips drawn back from her teeth, one short, shrill scream following fast upon another. Father Sallins did not again attempt to comfort her. McDowd remained by the window.
A telegram arrived out of the blue.
It was the summer of 1946. Long warm days cast an unobtrusive spell, one following another in what seemed like orderly obedience. The train I took crept through a landscape that was just beginning to lose its verdancy but was not yet parched. The railway for the last few miles of the journey ran by the sea, which twinkled brilliantly, sunlight dancing on it.
‘There’s someone called Pamela,’ Hubert said, greeting me in no other way. ‘Probably I mightn’t have mentioned her.’
We walked from Templemairt railway station, away from the sea, into a tangle of small suburban roads. Everywhere there were boarding-houses, cheaper than those by the promenade, Hubert said. Bookies’ families stayed there, he said: Sans Souci, Freshlea House, Cois na Farraige. We climbed a hill and passed through iron gates into a garden that was also on a hill, steep rockeries on either side of a path with occasional steps in it. I could see the house above us, through hollyhocks and shrubs, a glass veranda stretching the length of its facade.
‘Who’s Pamela?’
‘She spends the summers here. My cousin.’
We entered the house and a voice at once called out. ‘Hubert, I should like to meet your friend.’
‘Hell,’ Hubert muttered. He led me into a small room, its burnt-brown blinds half drawn against the sun. An old woman sat at a piano, turning on the stool as we entered. She was dressed severely, in long, old-fashioned black clothes; her grey hair was swept up and neatly rolled. You could tell she had once been beautiful; and in the wrinkled tiredness of her face her eyes were still young.
‘You are very welcome,’ she said. ‘Hubert does not often invite a friend.’
‘It’s nice of you to have me, Mrs Plunkett.’
The piano stool swivelled again. The first notes of a Strauss waltz were played. I picked my suitcase up and followed Hubert from the room. In the hall he threw his eyes upwards, but did not speak. Silently we mounted the stairs, and when we reached the first-floor landing a woman’s voice called up from some lower part of the house: ‘Hubert, don’t tell me you forgot the honeycomb?’
‘Oh,
I placed my suitcase on the bed of the room we’d entered: a small cell of a place, masculine in character. Just before we left it Hubert said:
‘My grandfather had a stroke. You won’t be bothered with him. He doesn’t come downstairs.’
On a table in the hall there was a dark-framed photograph of the man he spoke of, taken earlier in his lifetime: a stern, blade-like face with a tidy grey moustache, hair brushed into smooth wings on either side of a conventional parting, pince-nez, a watch-chain looping across a black waistcoat. At school Hubert had spoken a lot about his grandfather.
‘That was Lily who was on about the honeycomb,’ Hubert said as we descended the path between the rockeries. ‘A kind of general maid I think you call her. They work the poor old thing to the bone.’
We passed out of the garden and walked back the way we’d come. Hubert talked about boys we’d been at school with, in particular Ossie Richpatrick and Gale and Furney. He’d had news of all three of them: Ossie Richpatrick had become a medical student, Gale had joined the British army, Furney was in a handkerchief business.
‘The Dublin Handkerchief Company,’ Hubert said. ‘He wrote me a letter on their writing-paper.’
‘Does he make the handkerchiefs? I can’t see Furney making handkerchiefs.’
‘He sells them actually.’
Ossie Richpatrick and Gale and Furney had left school the previous summer; Hubert and I more recently, only a matter of weeks ago. It was now August; in October I was, like Ossie Richpatrick, to become a student, though
