The Collected Stories (51 page)

‘God, I’d never have thought of that in a hundred years.’

The news of the impending conversion was so strange that they kept it to themselves. On reflection they didn’t quite believe it and wanted not to appear fools, but when William was seen walking the avenue of young lime trees to the presbytery every Tuesday and Thursday evening for mandatory instruction it became widespread. Miracles would never cease among the stars of heaven. William Kirkwood, last of the Kirkwoods, was about to renounce the error of their ways and become a Catholic.

Canon Glynn, the old priest, was perfectly suited to his place. He had grown up on a farm, was fond of cards and whiskey, but his real passion in life was for the purebred shorthorns he grazed on the church grounds. In public he was given to emphasizing the mercy rather than the wrath of God and in private believed that the affairs of the earth ran more happily the less God was brought into them. At first he found the visits of this odd catechumen a welcome break in his all too predictable evenings, but soon began to be worn out by his pupil’s seemingly insatiable appetite for theological speculation. William was now pursuing Catholicism with the same zeal he had given for years to astronomy, reading every book on theology and church history he could lay hands on. Rather than be faced with this strenuous analysis of the Council of Trent, the old priest would have much preferred to have poured this over-intellectual childlike man a large glass of whiskey and to have talked about the five purebred shorthorns he was keeping over the winter and which he foddered himself in all weathers before saying daily Mass.

‘Look, William. You already know far more about doctrine than any of my parishioners, and I’ve never seen much good come from all this probing,’ he was driven to state one late evening. ‘We are human. We cannot know God or Truth. It is shut away from our
eyes. We can only accept and believe. It may be no more than the mother’s instinct for the child, and as blind, but it is all we have. In two weeks’ time, when I’ll ask you “Do you believe?” all I want from you is the loud and clear response, “I do.” There our part will end. Yours will begin. In my experience anything too much discussed and worried about always leads to staleness.’

William Kirkwood was far from blind. He understood at once that he had tired the old priest whom he had grown to like and respect. For the next two weeks, like the too obedient son he had always been, he was content to sit and follow wherever the priest’s conversation led, which, after the second whiskey, was invariably to the five purebred shorthorns now grazing on the short sweet grass that grew above the ruins of the once famous eighth-century monastery.

‘You can still see the monks’ tracks everywhere in the fields, their main road or street, the cells, what must have been their stables, all like a plan on paper. Of course the walls of the main buildings still stand, but they are much later, twelfth century. Great minds thundered at one another there once. Now my shorthorns take their place. It is all good, William,’ he would laugh.

At the end of the period of instruction, when the priest, a mischievous twinkle in his old eyes, asked, ‘Do you accept and believe all those revealed truths and mysteries?’ William Kirkwood smiled, bowed his head and said, ‘I do, Father.’

The next morning, beside the stone font at the back of the Cootehall church, water was poured over the fine greying head of William Kirkwood. As it trickled down on to the brown flagstones, it must have seemed a final pale bloodletting to any ghosts of the Kirkwoods hovering in the air around.

Annie May and Lieutenant McLoughlin stood as his godparents. Afterwards there were smiles, handshakes, congratulatory arm-clasps, and after Mass a big festive breakfast in the presbytery, attended by all the local priests and teachers and prominent parishioners. Annie May and Lucy were there as well. The only flaw in the perfect morning was that Lucy looked pale and tense throughout and on the very verge of tears when having to respond to a few polite questions during the breakfast. She had been strange with William ever since he began instruction, as if she somehow sensed that this change threatened the whole secure world of her girlhood.
As soon as they got home from the breakfast, she burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping and ran to her room. By evening she was better but would not explain her weeping, and that night was the first night in years that she did not come to him to be kissed on her way to bed. The following Sunday every eye was on the recent convert as he marched his men through the village and all the way up the church to the foot of the high altar. Lucy felt light-headed with pride as she saw him ascend the church at the head of his men. But the old ease between them had disappeared. She no longer wanted his help in the evenings with her exercises, preferring to go to school unprepared if necessary, and he did not try to force his help, waiting until this mood would pass.

‘Now that you have come this far, and everything has gone so well, you might as well go the whole distance,’ the Sergeant suggested with amiable vagueness one Sunday soon afterwards in Charlie’s. Rifle practice had been abandoned early. A ricochet had somehow come off the hill, had struck a red bullock of Murphy’s in the eye in a nearby field. The bullock, lowing wildly, began to stagger in circles round the field. A vet had to put it down. A report would have to be written. The accident had been the first in his command and William Kirkwood was inordinately annoyed. There must have been carelessness or wilful folly somewhere among the riflemen.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked very sharply.

‘It was nothing about today,’ McLoughlin interjected. ‘I think the Sergeant was only trying to say what we all feel. Everything has gone wonderfully well and it would complete the picture if we were to see you married,’ and both men saw William Kirkwood suddenly colour to the roots of his hair.

‘I’m too old,’ he said.

‘You left it late but it’s certainly far from too late.’

The conversation had brought on so much confusion that it was let drop. William left as usual after the one whiskey.

‘I’m afraid you struck the mark there,’ McLoughlin said as soon as they were alone.

‘How?’

‘You said what was plainly on his mind.’

‘It’s hardly Lucy.’

‘Lucy’s not in it at this stage, though she’s upset enough at
school about something or other,’ the teacher said.

‘What are we to do, then? We can’t just go out and find any old bird for the last of the Kirkwoods. She’ll have to be able to flap at least one good wing.’

‘I suppose you’ll be changing to pints now.’ Charlie appeared at the doorway, and, without waiting for an answer, went and cleared the whiskey glasses from the table.

‘A pair of pints, Charlie,’ the Sergeant said exuberantly. ‘Nothing decent ever stands alone. How long is it since we bundled you into the car that Sunday and found your good woman for you?’

‘It must be the best part of five years, Sergeant,’ Charlie laughed defensively, and when he laughed the tip of his small red nose wrinkled upwards in a curl.

‘It was a drastic solution to a drastic problem. You had the place nearly drunk out after your mother died. The first six women we called on that Sunday turned us down flat.’

‘I doubt they did right. I was no great catch.’

‘We were about to give up for that Sunday when we called on Baby. She said before we finished, “I’ll take him. I know the bar and the farm,” and we brought you in out of the car.’

‘Maybe that’s when she made her big mistake,’ Charlie tried to joke.

‘She made no mistake,’ the teacher put in gently, afraid that Charlie was being hurt by the Sergeant’s egotism, oblivious of everything but his own part in that Sunday. ‘She made the best move of her life. Look where you both are today – children, money. Who could want more?’

‘Maybe it’s as good as the other thing anyhow.’ Charlie laughed with unchanged defensiveness.

‘It’s far better. This love business we hear so much about nowadays is a pure washout,’ the teacher said definitively.

‘One thing is sure,’ the Sergeant said after Charlie had brought them the pints. ‘We can’t bundle William Kirkwood into the back of a car and drive
him
around for a whole Sunday until we find him a wife,’ and at the very absurdity of the picture both men began to laugh until tears ran from their eyes, and they had to pound their glasses on the table. When they were quiet, the Sergeant said, ‘There are more ways of choking a dog than with butter,’ which renewed the laughter.

What they didn’t know was that Charlie had been standing in the hallway all the time, rigid with anger as he listened. ‘The pair of bitches,’ he said quietly, his anger calming as he moved to face the men who were growing rowdy behind the wooden partition.

‘What will we do about the Captain? He didn’t seem averse to the idea,’ the Sergeant was saying in the parlour.

‘We can’t, as you put it, bring in any old bird. We’ll have to look hard and carefully. It’d be a very nice thing to see the Captain married.’ The teacher was serious.

The first to be approached was Eileen Casey, the junior mistress in the school in Keadue. She was twenty-eight, small, with very blonde straight hair, fond of reading, pretty in a withdrawn way. Her headmaster, a friend of McLoughlin’s, brought it up over the tea and sandwiches of the school lunch hour. When it was clear that she was not interested and was going out with a boy from her own place near Killala and was looking for a school closer to home so that they could marry, he pretended it had been nothing but a joke on his part. ‘We like to see how these rich converts look in our girls’ eyes.’

After this, the Sergeant and McLoughlin sat for a whole evening and compiled a list of girls. They were true to their word that they couldn’t bring in just any old bird. All the girls they picked were local flowers, and they knew they faced the probability of many rebuffs, but they studied how to go about it as circuitously and discreetly as possible.

Before this got under way, William Kirkwood came to McLoughlin’s bungalow to dinner for the first time. He felt ill at ease in the low rooms, the general cosiness, the sweet wine in cut glasses, and Mrs McLoughlin’s attempts at polite conversation. Not in all the years of his Protestantism had he ever felt his difference so keenly. What struck him most was the absence of books in a schoolmaster’s house. He disliked spirits after dinner, but this evening he was glad of the glass of whiskey in his hand as he faced McLoughlin in his front room while Mrs McLoughlin did the washing up. Around him, among the religious pictures and small statues, were all the heirlooms and photos of a married life that seemed to advance with resolute cheerfulness towards some sought-after stereotype. He was on edge, and when McLoughlin said, ‘We’ve started looking,’ he practically barked, ‘For what?’

‘For a good woman for you.’ McLoughlin didn’t notice the edge and smiled sweetly.

‘Dear Peter … I had no idea … This is too ridiculous.’ William Kirkwood was on his feet at once. ‘It is positively antediluvian.’ He had started to laugh dangerously. ‘Fortunately, no one will have me. Imagine the embarrassment of some poor woman who was fool enough to have me when she found I couldn’t abide her! I’d have to marry her. You couldn’t do otherwise to any unfortunate two-legged.’

McLoughlin sat the outburst through in open-mouthed dismay. ‘We thought you’d like to be married.’

‘That’s true. I would.’

He was even further taken aback by the positiveness of the ready response. ‘Is there any person you had in mind yourself?’ McLoughlin was glad to find any words on his lips.

‘Yes. There is,’ came even more readily still. ‘But what’s the use? She’d never have me.’

‘May I ask who she is?’

‘Of course you can. I was thinking of Miss Kennedy. Mary Kennedy.’

‘Well then. I don’t see why you had to get in such a state.’ It was McLoughlin’s turn to attack. ‘She was the first girl we were thinking of approaching.’

McLoughlin was not so much surprised by the preference as by the fact that the solitary isolated ‘odd’ Kirkwood should have a preference at all.

The Kennedys were a large local family, had good rock land and part of the woods, owned a sawmill and a small adjoining factory making crates and huge wooden drums on which electric cable was rolled. They had been rich enough to send Mary and her sisters to the Ursulines in Sligo. There she was nicknamed ‘big hips’, more for her laughing vitality than measurements. From the Ursulines she went to train as a nurse in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. She was black-haired and tall, too sharp featured to be beautiful, but there was about her an excitement and vitality that was more than beauty. Even the way she had of scratching her head as she laughed, her wide stance, intrigued men. At the Mater, she fell in love with a pale young doctor, conscientious and dull, who was flattered at first, but gradually he backed away from her high
spirits. When he broke with her, she came home and hung listlessly about the house for six months, sometimes going for long solitary walks.

It was on one of those walks that William Kirkwood met her in his own fields. She had been surprised by a play of the late October light all the way across the top of the hill, and there being no purpose to her walk she had crossed the stone wall to follow the streak of evening along the hill. To William’s polite inquiry, ‘May I help you in any way, Miss Kennedy?’ she had responded with a certain mischievousness – ‘No, thank you, Mr Kirkwood. I’m just out for a walk’ – because it was unheard of for a local person to be just out for a walk. Mary Kennedy was surprised to find the ‘young Mr Kirkwood’ that they used to laugh about when she was a child – the same Mr Kirkwood who spent all fine nights out in the fields studying the stars through a telescope and his days reading or in bed – a middle-aged man, tall and beautifully mannered certainly, but middle-aged. They chatted for a while before separating. She didn’t think much about the meeting but, apart from the good manners, what she remembered most was his openness and lack of furtiveness. Furtiveness was what she found in most Irish men when faced with a young woman.