‘She took the boys to the North to do a bit of Christmas shopping – so what?’
‘And she arranged to meet Colette there and they had a right old time buying presents and gadding about together.’
‘Where are you getting all of this from?’
‘Oh, they were seen.’
‘By who?’
‘That’s of no importance.’
‘If you’re coming in here launching accusations at my wife then you should have the balls to say who told you.’
‘Not accusations, James – facts.’
‘A mother was seen doing a bit of Christmas shopping with her son, those are the facts – and I’m supposed to go home and reprimand my wife over this, for what?’
‘I would say what you do with this information is your own business. I’m not going to tell you how to conduct your marriage. But what I will say is that often it’s difficult to see something that’s happening right under your own nose.’
‘Right, Shaun, you’ve said your bit, now I’m fully aware that my wife went shopping with Colette.’ James put his glasses back on his face and reached for the newspaper. ‘Thanks for filling me in. You can show yourself out.’
‘That wasn’t what I was referring to.’
James dipped his eye and looked over the rim of his glasses. ‘Then what are you saying?’
‘That the parish priest’s car is parked at your house more often than his own. It appears Izzy’s made another new friend in the past few months.’
‘I’d be very fucking careful about where you’re going with this,’ James said.
Shaun jammed his little finger into his ear. He grimaced and shook and then removed his finger, examining the tip.
‘Just because you failed to pay attention to what was going on with your own wife,’ James said, ‘doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do with mine.’
‘I’m just telling you what people are saying.’
‘Do you think I pay a blind bit of notice to what people are saying about me?’
‘I think you care a great deal about what people think of you, James. And maybe if you cared a little less, you might have had some real success. I think you play a careful game, and that you have more respect for your constituents than for your colleagues. That’s why you’ve managed to hold your seat for so long but . . . well, with all the changes that are going on in the government at the moment, it wasn’t difficult to spot that you’ve been passed over again.’
The door opened and Cassie struggled to close it against the wind. ‘Oh Jesus, it would skin you alive out there,’ she said.
‘Good day to you, James.’ Shaun rose from the seat, head bowed once again. He almost collided with Cassie as he walked out the door.
‘Goodbye now, Shaun,’ she said, wiping her feet on the mat.
James could hear a ringing in his ears, growing louder and louder.
‘Is everything all right?’ Cassie asked.
He looked down at his desk and there was Shaun’s glasses case with the little white cloth he’d used to wipe the lenses spilling
out of it. Taped to the inside was a piece of lined paper with his name, address, and phone number. James threw the case in
the bin beneath his desk. He took the bin and walked to the fireplace, passing along the mantelpiece. ‘I told you to get rid
of these fucking cards,’ he said, tossing each one in the bin as he went.
Chapter 16
If asked by anyone about the greatest trick the Catholic Church played on its congregants, and there were many, Father Brian Dempsey would have said the act of confession. It was the idea of it as an anonymous exchange that was most misleading. There was in fact enough light in the confessional to make out the shape of the person sitting on the opposite side of the grille, and so if you had some familiarity with that person, it would be possible to recognise them. And in a small town like Ardglas where there were maybe only a thousand inhabitants, and only a few hundred of those who regularly attended confession, it was even easier to discern who was speaking. You could recognise them by their voice alone. People had some idea of this themselves, and that was why they did not give detailed accounts of their sins but rather a sanitised version. ‘I told my wife to fuck off’ became ‘I used bad language towards my wife.’ ‘I rode my neighbour’s wife’ became ‘I was coveting my neighbour’s wife.’ ‘I beat my wife black-and-blue’ became ‘I was impatient with my wife.’
He was thinking about these things while he listened to Dolores Mullen’s confession. The enclosed space, the dead air, had a soporific effect and he was often half-asleep listening to other people’s sins or drifting off in some kind of reverie. People’s confessions were mostly so routine and dull, like their dreams, interesting only to them. But Dolores’s sins were growing less vague the longer she went on.
‘I feel such anger towards my husband,’ she said. Her voice shook with every word.
He had known it was Dolores from the moment she stepped into the confessional. Not only was she a religious woman who came to confession regularly – the mother and father and five sisters were all religious – but she had a head of hair on her so outsized it almost filled the entire compartment. He could see the haze of frizz in what little light filtered through the darkness.
‘He is unfaithful, Father,’ she continued. ‘He has been unfaithful many times. But this time I think that it’s with . . . well, I know that . . . I know that it’s with one of our . . . neighbours.’
Brian tried to think who in the vicinity of Donal Mullen’s house he might be riding. There were no other houses that close as far as he could remember.
‘He used to at least have the decency to do it away from home, to do it far enough away from me and our children, but now he has so little respect for me that he doesn’t even care if I know he’s going next door for it.’
And then he knew exactly who it was. She’d phoned him not two days previously to tell him she was no longer able to read at mass and hung up on him before he’d had a chance to respond.
‘And I think some night when he’s sleeping, I’m just going to get the knife out of the drawer in the kitchen and stick it in his back.’
It was amazing what people were trying to tell you if you really listened. Dolores was not so much concerned with being absolved of her sins as letting him know that her husband was not a good man. He might come to mass on Sundays and bounce his children on his knee, but Dolores was here to let the priest know that any positive impression that might give was false. And it was what Izzy was trying to tell him with that anecdote about the flower shop. She was saying, you know that man who laughs at your jokes and breaks bread with you and plays golf with you on the weekends? Well, that man is capable of selfishness and cruelty and because he will not confess to that, I’ll do it for him. And by going to the parish priest they were going straight to the top – they were telling the moral arbiter of their lives that their husbands were bad men. It astonished him, the deference priests were still shown, that even in this day and age men like Donal Mullen and James Keaveney would be mortified about the parish priest knowing what bastards they were.
As if he hadn’t guessed already.
And so he thought that one of his main roles in the parish was as a conduit for people’s resentments. Through him the powerless were able to wage some small revenge.
‘Oh, Dol . . . Dear, have you tried speaking to your husband about your suspicions?’
