In the shops and pubs every shred of evidence and every theory, no matter how outlandish, was weighed and tested. After the second day nothing new remained to be said. The village elders resumed the available facts and concluded that Brennan had taken his own life while his judgment had been impaired by financial worries. He knew that his business was on the verge of collapse, and the knowledge had proved too much for his self-esteem. He had deliberately bequeathed everyone a mystery to cover up what he must have seen as a sordid and inglorious end.

  Olga did not share their certainty.

  ‘Brennan came to see me the day before he disappeared,’ she said. ‘He asked me to show him my work and he promised to exhibit my best pieces in his craft shop at the motel. He wanted me to carve things with a local significance, using motifs from the megalithic remains here. He was excited and full of good ideas. He was thinking about the future. Dying was far from his thoughts.’

  ‘Then something must have happened after you spoke, a reverse in business perhaps. He had a finger in many pies, not all of them his own.’

  ‘He didn’t commit suicide, I’m sure of that. Only a man who has lost sight of the world outside himself would want to end his life.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me, Olga?’

  ‘Something is wrong. Do you think there was bad play?’

  ‘Foul play? I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you think.’

  ‘Like most people, I’m not sure. I’ve heard the verdict of the medical men. The police have made a search and have found nothing. What should I think?’

  ‘Don’t close your eyes just because you can’t see clearly. One thing is certain: his death caused no grief. When he was alive, people thought they admired him. They found out when he died that they had only envied him.’

  Father Jerry smiled at her rueful humour and said goodbye. As he walked up the avenue, he kept hearing her question: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I did what I could,’ he answered aloud. ‘I cross-examined Hugo again and again and prayed unavailingly for moral certainty – the certitudo moralis of the textbooks. Now I am plagued by doubts of conscience. Did I demand too much certainty? Surely all judgments of conscience are necessarily based on incomplete knowledge of the facts. Aren’t these doubts only to be expected after any judgment where the facts are not clear. I was never in doubt about the moral norms, only about their application in this particular case.’

  He felt pleased that there was little time for self-scrutiny; he had to devote the morning to preparing the funeral address. His first draft, critical and perhaps a shade splenetic, told the unvarnished truth about Arty Brennan, but the truth, he decided, was for another time and place. His second draft was circumspect and precise, dwelling on Brennan’s ‘good works’ while ignoring his destruction of a culture with a 2,000-year history behind it. When he had finished, he read it aloud, standing by the north window with the Glebe and the hippies’ tents under his eye.

  The following morning he sprayed the coffin with holy water from a brass aspergillum that Brennan had donated to the church, knowing in his heart that these obsequies would best be performed by Canon Bingo or a priest with an instinctive understanding of men who weren’t interested in two and two unless they made ten and made it quickly. Before reading the collect, he prayed for Christian humility, then listened in disbelief to his own voice and a beloved prayer that had become both bizarre and incongruous:

  O God, whose property is ever to have mercy and to spare, we humbly beseech Thee on behalf of the soul of Thy servant Arthur, whom Thou hast called out of this world, that Thou wouldst not deliver him into the hands of the enemy, nor forget him for ever, but command that he be taken up by Thy holy angels and borne to our home in paradise, that having put his hope and trust in Thee, he may not undergo the pains of hell, but may come to the possession of eternal joys.

  He struggled to count Brennan’s good and forget his bad, if only for an hour, yet he knew that the good would moulder and the bad would live in the hearts of men who had traded an ancient and spiritually enriching culture for the material conveniences of a cash economy. Even in death Brennan was victorious. What he had so blindly destroyed could never be rebuilt.

  For the address he had chosen a text from St Luke’s account of the Resurrection: ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.’ He waited in the pulpit for perfect silence, knowing that Canon Hackler and two other priests were seated in the sanctuary behind him; that every eye was on him; that every ear was straining to catch even one delicious hint of personal animus against the deceased. He spoke quietly, with each word carefully weighed and none that might be construed as ambiguous or insincere. While his mind ran on the incisive first draft in his hip-pocket, he could see in the faces below a gratified recognition of what was just and appropriate to the occasion. He refrained from telling them that Arty Brennan had turned their glen into a cheap peep-show for vulgar tourists who came to stare at them as if they were clowns in a circus. Instead his words had caused the here-and-now to recede before their eyes. He had given them a glimpse of a landscape that he himself had yet to see.

  After the funeral he invited the other priests to the parochial house for lunch. Canon Hackler congratulated him on an address which he described as ‘generous in its sympathy and sincere in its every expression’.

  ‘The words came only after a great struggle,’ Father Jerry admitted. ‘I had to listen hard to catch them.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said the canon. ‘Sincerity is a matter of style, little more than an absence of cliche. It is the art of leaving the wrong notes out.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ said Father Jerry peevishly.

  ‘His death has got us all off the hook — you and me and the bishop. At the very least we owe him a couple of Masses, and as scrupulous men we shall say them. It is more than his debtors will do for him now.’

  Father Jerry looked into the canon’s large, self-satisfied face and poured him another hefty Scotch. He had no wish to say even one more word about Brennan to anyone except himself. When the other priests had left, he stood by the window overlooking the Glebe and read the alternative address which he’d been carrying in his hip pocket since morning. He kept reading it over and over throughout the evening, as if reading could obliterate the sense of personal defilement that tortured him in his soul. He was still reading when Hugo returned from his nightly tipple at the motel. Father Jerry handed his brother the typewritten sheets and watched his flushed cheeks and moving eyes as he scanned the uncompromising lines. He had stretched out fully in the armchair, a heavy man with a heavy face struggling against the torpor of overindulgence.

  ‘It’s the real address, the one I didn’t — the one I couldn’t — give,’ Father Jerry explained.

  Hugo got to his feet and with his back to the fireplace read a paragraph in a voice that bore an uncanny resemblance to his brother’s:

  I remember from boyhood how two fiddlers came into the old hotel one morning and spent a long summer day making music. They stopped only for bread and soup and a pint of stout to slake their thirst, and they didn’t get as much as a penny for their playing. They didn’t expect payment; they played to give delight and to take delight in their art. Now, thirty years later, if you were on your deathbed and longing to hear a last reel, you wouldn’t find a fiddler to play it unless you resined his palm with money. It was not the least of Arty Brennan’s achievements that he showed us the place of culture in a cash economy — at least those aspects of culture, such as music and dancing, that can be seen and heard and paid for at a box office or gate. As we count the parts of our local heritage which we have lost, we should echo the deceased and say in self-justification: ‘What has no price tag has no value.’

  Hugo sat down and shook his head.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s only a cantle of the truth, not the full round. Why lift one corner of the veil? Better to live in mystery as Brennan died.’

  He handed Father Jerry the sheets and said good night. At the door he looked back and slowly tapped his forehead with his finger.

  ‘Forget the dead, they’re in safe keeping. They can’t escape by swimming ashore. Now the living are still in the running. You heard the funeral bell today. It had never been tolled more loudly. McDaid was determined to give his hero a hero’s send-off.’

  ‘In my view he overdid it. He pulled so hard that he cracked the bell. I’ll be giving him a piece of my mind in the morning.’

  ‘As I listened to the final stroke and the bell going “Bling!”, I couldn’t help feeling that McDaid had made a statement.’

  ‘You never rest, Hugo, do you?’

  ‘We’re a restless species. McDaid is one of us. Think about it, Father.’ Hugo laughed derisively as he closed the door.

  Part II

  Olga

  Chapter 9

  He was back on the island again, the sea all round him and the night so dark that he could not make out his hands. He got down on his knees and groped along the sloping ground on every side. He was in the centre of the hogs-back, he lacked the confidence to walk. He wanted to get back to the place where he had beached the boat and left his clothes in a neat pile on a rock. The noise of the sea grew louder with the rising wind, and the shingle rattled as the waves ran back. What if they should carry his boat down the shore and break it into splinters on the reef beyond? He began crawling slowly down the slope in the direction of the rattle, which had become the noise a savage might make as he gargled in the morning. Suddenly the gargling came from behind. All round him waves were breaking and stones rolling back and forth in the night. From under the waves came a distant ringing and a gravelly voice that said, ‘Doe to the book, quench the candle but do not toll the bell.’

  The sun was shining through the parted curtains when he woke. It was barely six o’clock. The hills in the east merged luminously in the morning haze and the hollow of the glen gleamed bright with reflections. The Glebe was quiet. Within the ring of green and brown tents no one moved. To the west a row of white seagulls dozed on the roof of the fishmeal factory. Nothing had changed. Not really. Brennan’s business had been put into receivership, and the receiver was anxious to sell it as a going concern rather than in bits and pieces. A businessman with money to burn would buy it for a song. The motel, the fishmeal factory and the hippies were here to stay. The idea of Brennan was in the very air he breathed. All his death had achieved was that the glen had been spared, at least for the moment, that anathema of anathemas, the Holiday Village.

  Father Jerry dressed and stole downstairs so as not to wake Hugo who was gargling obscenely as he snored. The scented morning air was cool in spite of the sunshine. The glen was soundless; in the fields not a cow or bullock stirred. He leant against the gate pier as a naked woman appeared at the bend of the road. She was coming towards him, jogging rather than running. Now he could see her thighs moving up and down and her rounded breasts bouncing with a shadow in between. He turned his head and gazed across the glen at the face of the north mountain, a solid, unyielding mass that was solid and unyielding in every weather. He tested the ground beneath him with his heel. The hippies didn’t know the word ‘enough’. They fornicated and smoked pot; they got drunk and stole their neighbours’ hard-won turf. All that was nothing compared with jogging naked, every nook and appendage on display. As he waited, he refused to look again in her direction. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the purple of the mountain and thought of Brennan still active while the whole glen slept.

  ‘Good morning, Father Jerry.’ Olga gave a breathless laugh.

  She stood before him in a cream-coloured tracksuit with her hands on her hips and her hair tied neatly in a pony-tail behind. Her cheeks glowed red and her breasts still heaved as she breathed. Her tracksuit was tight-fitting, her body firm and strong.

  ‘You’re up early.’ He was determined to show no emotion.

  ‘I ate a heavy supper and decided to work it off before breakfast. Wood carving keeps me fit but unfortunately it doesn’t exercise the legs.’

  Her tracksuit was almost flesh-coloured. Her legs were long like a frog’s.

  ‘The morning is the best time for jogging,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘It’s the coolest time, and there’s no one around to stare at you.’

  ‘If you don’t wish to attract attention, you should find yourself a less spectacular tracksuit.’ He smiled amiably to conceal any nuance of censure.

  ‘This isn’t a tracksuit, it’s a leotard. I bought it in Munich in a sale and never wore it till this morning.’

  ‘You could dye it black.’

  ‘Ah, you’d like me to jog like a nun. ‘Bye for now.’

  She left him with a mocking laugh. He watched the easy rhythm of her jogging and told himself that she was too unworldly to intend offence. He walked up the avenue without looking back. In his study was a photograph of sixty-three young men in clerical suits and round white collars that had been taken on his ordination day. Most of them were practical, rough-and-ready men with little gift for reflection, destined to fit easily into a world of parish bazaars, jumble sales and bingo. They had come from small farms and small towns, and those who weren’t close to the soil were close to the common people. Though they had studied theology and canon law, they drew their spiritual strength from the simple beliefs of their unquestioning parents. Canon Hackler was such a man, and so was the bishop. They went about their business as would a conscientious solicitor. Religion was a matter of doing things and getting things done. It had little to do with the solitary life of the spirit and the spirit’s craving for exaltation and joy.

  He sat at his writing desk by the window and after a moment’s thought wrote three paragraphs on a plain postcard:

  Dear Dr Sharma,

  Late yesterday the sky was heavy and dark with a judas of piercing light in the west. I stared into the judas long and stubbornly but no glint of light entered my mind. I seemed to fall into a slumber and when I woke the pinpoint of light had faded into watery grey.

  Nature is alien, you once said to me. Nothing in the universe is meant for man. The mountain will never come to Mohammed, and Mohammed is besotted with its permanency and solidity. He is truly and utterly alone.

  I grope for the shape of things in the dark, seeking knowledge that still eludes me. I’d like to hear from you. A paragraph on a postcard would do.

  Father Jerry

  After breakfast he walked up the hill to the cottage where Mandamus McDaid lived alone.

  ‘I’ve come about the bell,’ he said.

  ‘She’ll never ring again,’ said McDaid. ‘I had a look at her yesterday. The crack is over six inches long.’

  ‘What caused the crack?’

  ‘Metal fatigue. I was ringing out poor old Arty Brennan, and somehow I got carried away. It was the last pull that did it. The sound that came from above my head was the last sound that bell will ever make on earth. The bell died with Arty, there’s no denying it.’

  ‘It isn’t the first bell that lost its voice here,’ Father Jerry said sharply. ‘I’ll get a bell-founder from Dublin to look at it. Believe me, it will ring again.’

  ‘I know about bells because they’re in the family. My father was sexton and so was my grandfather. That bell cracked before, way back in Grandfather’s time. It was only a hairline crack, and brazing put it right again. This time it’s different. The bell is buggered. It will never wake the living in their beds any more.’

  They were standing in McDaid’s back yard surrounded by pecking hens. McDaid looked unnaturally clean shaven and clear-skinned, and his piercing blue eyes seemed to reflect the purity of the morning sky. He looked down at Father Jerry who wondered if the other man experienced subtleties of the spirit denied to himself.

  ‘We need a new bell,’ McDaid went on. ‘I’ve been talking to one or two members of the parish council —’

  ‘Behind my back?’

  ‘Gossip, like wonders, will never cease. It always sprouts best when someone’s back is turned.’

  McDaid’s eyes lit up with mischievous humour. Then the light in them faded and he seemed to look inwards as if he were alone.

  ‘A new bell is out of the question. The old one must ring again with the same old tone.’

  ‘Then I’m out of a job. What’s broken is broken and what’s dead is dead. There’s no turning back the clock. You’re the opposite of Arty Brennan, Father. Now he was for ever putting the hands of the clock forward when everyone’s back was turned.’

  ‘Arty Brennan is dead, may he rest in peace.’

  ‘He’s dead and he isn’t dead. He left an empty space behind him that no one else will fill. As long as we feel it inside us, he’s still alive. I had great hopes when Hugo came back. We were all together again, all except Mary Rose. I thought something outlandish was bound to happen. Little did I know.’

  ‘What did you think might happen?’

  ‘I was thinking about the Game.’

  ‘We’re grown men now, we’ve put away childish things.’

  ‘There was nothing childish about the Game. We were grown men at twelve and didn’t know it.’

  ‘I don’t like all this talk about things that are dead and buried. We were children. We behaved like children. We lived in a world of adults, all we knew was imitation.’

  ‘Now we are the adults,’ said McDaid. ‘Who do we imitate now? You’re a priest, so I know what you’ll say. Nothing’s changed, life is still a game.’

  ‘Not for me. I’m serious in everything I do and say.’

  ‘Then say something that will surprise me, Father. Something that comes from you alone.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Father Jerry. ‘I could serve you old wine in new bottles.’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21