The Hill Bachelors Read online

  ‘It’s where we’ve ended.’

  So softly that was spoken, Grattan hardly heard it, and then it was repeated, increasing his bewilderment. Why did it seem he was being told that the confidence the priests possessed was a surface that lingered beyond its day? Why, listening, did he receive that intimation? Why did it seem he was being told there was illusion, somewhere, in the solemn voices, hands raised in blessing, the holy water, the cross made in the air? At Ennismolach, long ago, there had been the traps and the side-cars and the dog-carts lined up along the Sunday verges, as the cars were lined up now outside the Church of the Holy Assumption. The same sense of nourishment there’d been, the safe foundation on a rock that could not shatter. Why did it seem he was being reminded of that past?

  ‘But surely,’ he began to say, and changed his mind, leaving the two words uselessly on their own. He often read in the paper these days that in the towns Mass was not as well attended as it had been even a few years ago. In the towns marriage was not always bothered with, confession and absolution passed by. A different culture, they called it, in which restraint and prayer were not the way, as once they had been. Crime spread in the different culture, they said, and drugs taken by children, and old women raped, and murder. A plague it was, and it would reach the country too, was reaching it already. The jolly Norbertine man of God grinned from the newspaper photograph in village shops and farmhouse kitchens, on cottage dressers, propped up against milk jugs at mealtimes, and he grinned again on television screens. Would he say that all he ever did was to reach out and gather in his due, that God had made him so? In the different culture Christ’s imitation offered too little.

  ‘I often think of those monks on the islands,’ Father Leahy said. ‘Any acre they’d spot out on the sea they would row off to to see could they start a community there.’

  ‘They would.’

  ‘Cowled against the wind. Or cowled against what’s left behind. Afraid, Father MacPartlan says. When Father MacPartlan comes in to breakfast you can see the rims of his eyes red.’

  An image of the older priest was vivid for a moment in Grattan’s recall, his mourning black, the collar cutting into pink flesh, hair that had thinned and gone grey over the years of their acquaintanceship. That this man wept in the night was barely credible.

  ‘I never left Ireland,’ Father Leahy said. ‘I have never been outside it.’

  ‘Nor I.’ The silence after that was part of the dark, easily there, not awkward. And Grattan said, ‘I love Ireland.’

  They loved it in different ways: unspoken in the dark, that was another intimation. For Grattan there was history’s tale, regrets and sorrows and distress, the voices of unconquered men, the spirit of women as proud as empresses. For Grattan there were the rivers he knew, the mountains he had never climbed, wild fuchsia by a seashore and the swallows that came back, turf smoke on the air of little towns, the quiet in long glens. The sound, the look, the shape of Ireland, and Ireland’s rain and Ireland’s sunshine, and Ireland’s living and Ireland’s dead: all that.

  On Sundays, when Mass was said and had been said again, Father Leahy stood in a crowd watching the men of Kildare and Kerry, of Offaly and Meath, yelling out encouragement, deploring some lack of skill. And afterwards he took his pint as any man might, talking the game through. For Father Leahy there was the memory of the cars going by, his bare feet on the cobbles of the yard, the sacrifice he had made, and his faithful coming to him, the cross emblazoned on a holy robe. Good Catholic Ireland, a golden age.

  ‘Anywhere you’d be,’ Grattan said, ‘there’s always change. Like day becoming night.’

  ‘I know. Sure, I know of course.’

  Father Leahy’s cigarette dropped on to the ground. There was the sound of his shoe crunching away the spark left in the butt, then his footsteps began on the gravel. A light came on when he opened the car door.

  ‘You’re not left bereft, you know,’ Grattan said.

  ‘Father MacPartlan looked over the table tonight after he’d put sugar in his tea. What he said to me was you’d given Con Tonan his life back. Even though Con Tonan wasn’t one of your own.’

  ‘Ah, no, no, I didn’t do that.’

  ‘D’you know the way it sometimes is, you want to tell a person a thing?’

  The curate’s hand was held out in the little pool of light, and there was the same friendliness in the clasp before he started the car’s engine.

  ‘Father Leahy called in last night,’ Grattan heard himself reporting to Mrs Bradshaw. ‘The first time a priest ever came to the rectory that I remember.’ And Mrs Bradshaw, astonished, would think about it all morning while she worked, and would probably say before she left that the curate calling in was an expression of the ecumenical spirit they were all on about these days. Something like that.

  For a few more minutes Grattan remained outside, a trace of tobacco smoke still in the garden, the distant hum of the curate’s car not quite gone. The future was frightening for Father Leahy, as it had been for the monks who rowed away from Ireland once, out on to their rocks; as it had been for his father on his deathbed. But the monks and his father had escaped, mercy granted them. The golden age of the bishops was vanishing in a drama that was as violent as the burning of the houses and the fleeing of the families, and old priests like Father MacPartlan were made melancholy by their loss and passed their melancholy on.

  ‘Come on, Oisín,’ Grattan called, for his dog had wandered in the garden. ‘Come on now.’

  He had paid Con Tonan what he could; he’d been glad of his company. He had never thought of Con Tonan in his garden as a task he’d been given, as a single tendril of the vine to make his own. But the priest had come this evening to say it had been so, and by saying it had found a solace for himself. Small gestures mattered now, and statements in the dark were a way to keep the faith, as the monks had kept it in an Ireland that was different too.

  Good News

  ‘Hi,’ the bald man with the earrings said. ‘I’m Roland.’

  He looked at Bea from behind small, round spectacles. She watched his gaze passing slowly over her features, over her shoulders and her chest, her hands on the table between them. Bea was nine, with dark hair that was long, and brown eyes with a dreamy look that was sometimes mistaken for sadness.

  ‘You’re going to show us, Leah?’ the man with earrings said, and the girl who stood beside him, in a navy-blue jumper and jeans, ran a finger down a list on her clipboard and told him the name was Bea.

  ‘Take your time, Leah,’ the man said.

  Bea had practised, the curtains drawn so that it was dark, Iris suddenly switching on the table lamp. Waking up on the sofa, wondering where she was, was what was marked on the script as the bit they would ask her to do.

  She crossed to where two chairs were drawn close together to represent the sofa. She lay down on them and waited for the girl with the clipboard to say she’d switched the light on, as she’d said she would. Bea’s hands went up then, shielding her eyes, not making too much of the gesture, not milking it, as Iris had explained you never should, subtlety being everything.

  ‘Quite nice,’ the man with the earrings said.

  *

  Iris was Bea’s mother. Iris Stebbing she’d been born, but she’d turned that into Iris Orlando for professional purposes, and Iris Adams she’d become when she married Dickie. It was several years since she had gone for a part herself — ‘woman in massage parlour’ — which they’d said at the last minute she wasn’t quite right for. Occasionally she still rang up about a forthcoming production she’d read about in The Stage and they always promised to bear her in mind. But they never rang back.

  Bea was different, with everything ahead of her. And Bea had talent, Iris was certain of that. She could see her one day as Ophelia, or the young just-married in Outward Bound, which she had played herself, or Rachel-Elizabeth in Bring on the Night. Iris had taught Bea all she knew.

  Another child came in to wait, with a stou
t young woman who was presumably a mother too, unhealthy-looking, Iris considered. The child was timid, which of course was what they wanted, but rabbity in appearance, which Iris doubted they’d want, not for a minute. Bea was quiet, always had been, but she didn’t look half dead. More to the point, she didn’t have teeth like that.

  ‘Hi,’ the mother said.

  Iris wrinkled her lips a bit, the smile she gave to strangers. There would be others, of course. Every fifteen minutes, they’d keep coming all morning. She knew the drill.

  Iris was not a young mother herself. She hadn’t wanted to have children, but when she reached forty she had suddenly felt panicky, which of course — she readily admitted — was her all over. She had a part in the hospital serial then, but she’d begun to think she’d never have another one. The last year in Wanstead it was. Dickie was still on the road, office stationery.

  Another mother and another child came in, the mother even younger than the fat one, the child brazen-faced, not right at all. They liked to be early, half an hour at least, and this time there was no greeting, nothing said, no smiles. Competitiveness had taken over; Iris could feel it in herself, a mounting dislike of those she shared the small waiting-room with.

  ‘There we are,’ the girl in the navy-blue jumper and jeans said, bringing Bea back. ‘You like to come in now?’ she invited the rabbity child, and shook her head when the mother attempted to accompany her. ‘We’ll call you this evening,’ she said to Iris, ‘if Bea has been successful. After five it’ll be. All right, after five?’

  Iris said it would be, handing Bea her coat. They didn’t say ‘Don’t ring us’ any more, a joke it had become. But she remembered when it wasn’t.

  A mother and child were on the way in as they left and Iris stared quickly at the child: lumpy, you couldn’t call her anything else, and thin hair with a grey tinge.

  ‘Let’s have a coffee,’ Iris said on the street.

  *

  Bea was thinking about Dickie. When Iris had come off the phone and said there’d be an audition she had thought about him; and ever since, while they were practising and going through the script, he’d kept coming into her mind. It was two years since the quarrel about the shirts, when Iris said she’d had enough and Dickie went off, the summer before last, a Monday.

  ‘They say they liked you?’ Iris asked in the café. ‘They say anything?’

  Bea shook her head, then pushed back her hair where it had fallen over her forehead. John’s the café was called, all done out in green, which Bea liked because it was her favourite colour. They sat at a counter that ran along the windows and a girl brought them cappuccinos.

  ‘They only said about the waking up,’ Bea said.

  When she’d told Dickie about the audition he’d stopped suddenly as they were walking across the dusty grass in the Wild Park. She’d told him then because Iris said she should, the Sunday after it was all fixed up. He’d stood perfectly still, looking into the trees in the distance, then he turned and looked down at her. That was marvellous, he said.

  ‘They wanted you to do it with the movements?’ Iris asked. ‘Like I showed you?’

  Bea shook her head. They didn’t want movements, she said. The man called her Leah, she said.

  ‘Leah? My God, he thought you were one of the others! My God!’

  ‘He didn’t understand “Bea”.’

  She’d known what was passing through Dickie’s thoughts when he heard the news in the Wild Park. She’d known because of the other times there’d been good news — when Iris won fifteen pounds in the milkman’s draw, when Dickie was in work again one time, when Iris’s aunt died and there was the will. Dickie had been invited in the Sunday after the milkman’s draw and there’d been a bottle of wine. ‘He still holding on to that job?’ Iris would ask, but he hadn’t, not for long; and the will had brought only the fish cutlery. But even so, good news when it came always brightened things up where Dickie and Iris were concerned, and one of these days it wouldn’t just go away again. Quite often Bea felt sure of that.

  ‘You told that man, though? You said about the name?’

  ‘The girl knew.’

  ‘You said it to her? You’re sure?’

  ‘She had it written down.’

  It was July, warm and airless, no sign of the sun. It pleased Bea that all this had occurred when the summer holidays were about to start and no one in her class would have to know she was in an audition for a TV thing. ‘Of course you’ll have to say,’ Iris had said, ‘if you get the part. On account they’ll see you when it comes on.’

  Bea thought she probably wouldn’t. It could even be they wouldn’t recognize her, which was what she’d like. She didn’t know why she wanted that, at the same time wanting so much to get the part because of Dickie. ‘So what kind of a story is it?’ Dickie had asked in the Wild Park and she said a woman was murdered in it.

  ‘Practise a bit?’ Iris said when they were back in the flat, after they’d had clam chowder and salad.

  Bea didn’t want to, now that the audition was over, but Iris said it would pass the time. So they practised for an hour and then sat by the open window, listening to the sound of the traffic coming from Chalmers Street, watching the people going by, the afternoon turned sunny at last. ‘Don’t be disappointed,’ Iris kept saying, and when the telephone rang at a quarter to six she said it could be anyone. It could be Dickie about tomorrow, or the telephone people, who often rang at this time on a Saturday to explain some scheme or other, offering free calls if you did what they wanted you to do.

  But it was the girl in the navy-blue jumper to say that Bea had got the part.

  *

  The rehearsals took place in an army drill-hall. Iris had to be there too, and at the studios where the set was, and on location. She had arranged to take her holiday specially; and it worried Bea that she intended to call in sick when the holiday time ran out. ‘I know this place!’ she cried, excitedly looking round the drill-hall when they walked into it the first morning.

  ‘A while ago now,’ Bea heard her telling the woman who’d said she was playing the bag-lady. She’d had great ambitions, Iris said, but then the marriage and all that had been a setback. He’d been out of work for six years as near’s no matter, and then again later of course. A regular thing it became and she’d had to take what was going in a typing pool. Ruinous that was, as she’d known it would be, as anyone in the profession could guess.

  ‘The kiddie’ll make it up to you,’ the bag-lady predicted. ‘Definitely,’ she added, as if making up herself for not sounding interested enough.

  ‘When the call came I couldn’t believe it. “Ring Dickie,” I said. Well, it’s only fair, no matter what the past.’

  ‘A father’d want to know. Any father would.’

  ‘She’s had to have her hair cut off.’

  Bea listened to these exchanges because there was nothing else to do. When she’d rung Dickie to tell him he’d said immediately that he was over the moon and she knew he was. ‘You say well done to Iris for me,’ he’d said, and immediately she had imagined him coming back to the flat, as sometimes she did, arriving with his two old suitcases. ‘Well, what d’you know!’ he’d kept saying on the phone. ‘Well, I never!’

  He liked Bea to call him Dickie because she called Iris Iris; he liked the warmth of it, he said. ‘Remember the time we stayed in the hotel?’ he often reminded her, having once taken her to Brighton for a night. ‘Remember the day we saw the accident, the bus going too fast? Remember the first time in the Wild Park?’

  He was big and awkward, given to knocking things over. He had another child, dark-skinned, who didn’t live with him either. ‘You tell her good old Iris,’ he said on the phone, giving credit where it was due because he knew Iris had been trying for this for years. ‘You won’t forget now, old girl?’

  Any excuse, he’d be back. When he said he was over the moon it was because this was the kind of chance that could change everything. Bea saw him once a f
ortnight, a week on Sunday the next time was and he’d said he couldn’t wait.

  ‘Hi, Bea,’ the man called Roland said, getting her name right when they were all sitting down at the drill-hall’s long trestle-table. The girl in the navy-blue jumper had a walkie-talkie attached to her clipboard, and a badge with Andi on it. A boy with fuzzy hair was handing round biscuits, and coffee in paper cups. ‘Best coffee in London,’ he kept saying and sometimes someone laughed.

  Bea watched while the scripts were leafed through, some of them being marked with a ballpoint. She turned the pages of hers, finding page fourteen, which was where she came into it, even though in the whole script she didn’t actually speak. ‘Mr Hance,’ the man who came to sit in the chair next to hers introduced himself as, giving the name of the character he played. He was thin and lank, with milky eyes beneath a squashed forehead, his grey suit spotted a bit, his tie a tight knot in an uncomfortable-looking collar. ‘You’ve dressed the part,’ Bea had heard Andi saying to him.

  ‘From the top,’ Roland called out, and the drill-hall went silent. Then the voices began.

  It was the old woman with the dyed red hair who was murdered. In the drill-hall her elderliness was disguised with bright crimson lipstick and the henna in her hair. Mr Hance put the poison in the yoghurt carton that was left with her milk on Wednesdays and Fridays. Iris had explained all that, but Bea understood it better when she heard the voices in the drill-hall.

  Not that she understood everything. In the script it said that Mr Hance played marbles with her, which was a game no one Bea knew played or had an interest in. ‘That’s a very lonely man,’ Iris had said, but it seemed peculiar to Bea that a lonely person wouldn’t go to the pub or some billiard hall instead of playing marbles with a child in a car park. In the script she was meant to be lonely herself; ‘Little Miss Latchkey’ Mr Hance called her because there was never anyone at home to let her in. In the script it said the old woman had tidy white hair, and a walking-stick because she couldn’t manage without one.