When she stopped, he looked up at her, his arms still shielding his head. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ he said. ‘She was fast asleep in her bed, drunk . . . The smoke. A fire like that. You’d take in a few lungfuls and you’d be knocked out before the flames would even touch you.’

‘Well, that’s another lie, Donal, because you know where they found her body. They peeled her off the kitchen floor because she crawled on her hands and knees to try and escape that fire.’ And she proceeded to hit him again but the energy required was consumed by the racking sobs passing through her. She collapsed against him, her face pressed into his side, and she could feel him adjust his body to get a better handle on her, to corral the great heaving mess of her. She felt the warmth in his hands as they moved across her, down her thigh, the touch of his palm against hers as he slipped the rosary from her fingers.

Chapter 25

The house came into view around the curve of a short drive. It lay in the shadow of the church. When Izzy had called the night before, he’d said, ‘Just aim for the steeple and you can’t miss me.’ And there he was now cutting at the ivy on the front of the house with a pair of shears. He was in civvies – black slacks, a red jumper over a white shirt, a pair of black rubber-soled shoes. How like any other middle-aged man he looked, his grey hair licked up in waves on the crown of his balding head. He paid no attention to the noise of the car, just carried on cutting.

She had surprised him by phoning, certainly, and surprised him further by telling him she would be down to see him the following afternoon. She’d been expecting some level of hostility, but in fact his tone was so affectless as to offer no indication of his feelings.

She pulled the handbrake and stopped the engine, watched him take a moment to appraise his work. He appeared to be out of breath, his shoulders rising and falling. He bent down to lean the shears against the wall and then rose without quite meeting her eye, his mouth hanging open in a way that at least resembled a smile.

‘Isn’t it a grand place they gave you?’ she said, getting out of the car.

It was a much more handsome property than the parochial house in Ardglas. There was a cut-stone exterior and it was elegantly proportioned, and the grounds were mature, the branches of the tall trees like a vaulted ceiling over the drive. Neat little hedgerows squatted under the ground-floor windows.

‘Oh, I’m well looked after,’ he said, approaching her.

She cast an eye back down the drive. ‘But you must have your work cut out for you with these grounds.’

‘Oh, I have a fellow who comes and does a bit of work for me one day a week. The rest of the time I just do a bit of maintenance, you know, to keep myself out of trouble.’ He was fussing with his gardening gloves.

‘Come here to me,’ she said, and peeled apart the Velcro at one wrist, then the other. She slid the gloves off and handed them to him, trying not to catch his eye. She turned to the car and opened the back door. ‘Eclairs,’ she said, taking out a white box. ‘You’re fond of those, I seem to remember.’

‘You’ll come in,’ he said, taking the box from her. She followed him through the front door. He stopped halfway down the hall and nodded in the direction of an open doorway. ‘Sit yourself in there and I’ll make the tea.’

The house stank of damp. When she stepped into the drawing room, she had to stop herself from going around and throwing every window open. She took a seat on a high-backed sofa that sank so uncomfortably low it was like sitting on the floor. Feeling foolish, she moved to an armchair that faced the door and gave her a view of the entire room. They were such strange places, these priests’ homes, the décor always a couple of decades behind. This room was all textured wallpaper and shag-pile carpet. There were coverlets draped over the backs of chairs, sleeves dressed the arms. The house was decorated with the fuss of an old woman, yet was still so identifiably inhabited by a man. Not a single flower anywhere or an ornament that might make the place look homely. And what items there were – a chessboard, a black-and-white photo of his parents she recognised from his living room in Ardglas – were so isolated as to look temporary, stagey. Even the tall bookshelf that took up one entire wall was only half filled. And lamps. Everywhere there were lamps, but none of them were turned on and the room was in near darkness. She didn’t know where to start with all the lamps.

The door edged open as Brian butted his way into the room with the tea tray.

She laughed. ‘Well, that is a sight to behold,’ she said. ‘Never in my life have I seen a priest make his own tea.’

‘Well, I have no housekeeper on the weekends,’ he said, as he struggled to place the rattling tray on the low coffee table.

‘Is she as much of a bitch as your old one?’ Izzy asked.

‘Now, Izzy,’ he smiled, ‘it doesn’t behove you to be making fun of poor Stasia Toomey.’

‘Poor Stasia, my eye. She’s a battle-axe if ever there was one blessed, marked, or made.’

‘She served me very well during my brief station as parish priest of Ardglas.’

‘I bumped into her in Doherty’s the other day and she says to me, “I suppose you’ve been down to Claremorris to see him – you were great friends, the pair of yous.”’ Izzy used a simpering voice and fluttered her eyelashes like a schoolgirl. ‘And then I said, “Claremorris? The pope couldn’t get me to go to Claremorris.” That took the wind out of her sails.’

He sat down heavily in an armchair across from her, expelled an exhausted breath. She looked at the eclairs, thrown on a plate with absolutely no finesse whatsoever.

‘It wouldn’t have been too hard to find out where I was,’ he said. ‘If you’d wanted to know.’

‘I knew where you were,’ she said. ‘It was no great secret.’

The look he gave her then was so unguarded, she hadn’t the strength to meet it. She busied herself with pouring the tea.

‘The new priest seems to be getting on well, Father Garvin,’ she said. ‘But I can’t say I’m all that fond of him. More of the same, you know? Too sweet to be wholesome. It would do them all good to be a bit more like you, to spend a bit of time out in the real world. None of them have a clue – advising people on how to live their lives, when they go straight from under their mothers’ skirts to the seminary.’

He coughed, laid down his cup on the table with a clatter.

‘You’re determined to punish me, aren’t you?’ she said, and she reached down at her feet for her handbag but she hadn’t seen an ashtray anywhere. ‘Have you given up?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Smoking – have you stopped?’

‘Two weeks,’ he said.

‘Well done.’ She let her handbag drop back onto the floor. ‘That’s a big achievement.’

‘But you can smoke if you want.’ He laid his hands on the armrests and made to get up. ‘I’ll get you an ashtray.’

‘No, I won’t,’ she said, taking up her cup and saucer again. ‘I won’t. I wouldn’t do that to you. It’s hard enough.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to get used to it. I tried chewing the gum—’

‘Oh, it’s a dirty, disgusting habit that, you’d be better off smoking.’

‘And then I decided to just persevere.’

‘It’s the only way to do it. Every week I say to myself I’m giving them up. But sure, now’s not the time.’ She took a sip from her cup. ‘Anyway, how are they treating you down here?’

‘Oh, you know yourself, there are good, kind, generous people everywhere – here’s no exception.’

‘Don’t give me that shit – there are bad, evil, cruel, ignorant bastards everywhere as well. That wasn’t what I asked you.’

‘I have been treated with the utmost kindness and courtesy by every single person I have encountered,’ he said. ‘Does that satisfy you?’

‘You can be as angry as you like,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t know a thing about it. I showed up at your house one day and you were gone and that was the first I knew.’

‘It was a surprise to me too.’

‘And if it’s worth anything to you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it.’

‘It’s not worth much as it happens, because I know that none of it was your fault. I didn’t need you to apologise. What I needed . . . what I expected, was just some message. But there wasn’t a word from you. And I was angry. It was a big upheaval in my life, you know, moving down here, when I’d just settled in Ardglas, and made friends – or thought I had. And one of the old tricks we’re taught is to pray for people when we feel hurt by them and so I prayed for you and I prayed for your husband—’

‘Oh, don’t waste your prayers on him, he’s a dead loss.’

‘It didn’t seem to be working. But when you have a job like mine, people are coming to you every day – telling you things, terrible things. People really have terrible, difficult, hard lives. And when you hear them, you realise you’ve never really had a bad day. And that seemed to help me to forget or to reduce my anger at least, but I was foolish to think that was the same as having forgiven you. And when you phoned last night, I realised I’d failed in that.’

‘If you knew the row we had over you.’ Her throat tightened so the last word came out choked. She shook her head, tried to blink away the tears.

‘I’d say that, all right. But I’d also say any problems you and James have, you had before I came along.’