Selected Stories

He didn’t disagree, but knew that there was something missing in how his sister put this. They got on because, dutiful in turn, he saw to it that they did. Bartholomew’s delicate good looks – fair hair, blue eyes – made the most of a family likeness that was less pleasing in Hester, his lithe ranginess cumbersome in a woman. All in all, it seemed only right that there should be adjustment, that any efforts made in the question of getting on should be his, and without acknowledgement.

Bartholomew didn’t have a parish of his own. He assisted in one on the north side of the city, where Maunder Street was too: visiting the elderly, concerned with Youth Reach and Youth Action and the running of the Youth Centre, on Saturdays taking parties of children to ramble in the Dublin mountains or to swim in one of the northside’s swimming-pools. He and Hester shared the family possessions when it was clearly no longer practical to retain the rented accommodation above the breadshop; Bartholomew found a room in the parish where he worked; Hester looked about for one. She made enquiries at the Gas Board about returning to a position similar to the one she had filled in the past, but for the moment there was nothing. Then she discovered Oscarey.

It was a townland in the Wicklow mountains, remote and bleak, once distinguished by the thriving presence of Oscarey House, of which no trace now remained. But the church that late in the house’s existence had been built on the back avenue, for the convenience of the family and its followers, was still standing; and the estate’s scattering of dwellings – the houndsman’s and its yard and kennels, the gamekeeper’s, the estate agent’s pebble-dashed house – had undergone renovation and were all occupied. There was a Spar foodstore at Oscarey crossroads, an Esso petrol pump; letters could be posted a few miles away.

Bartholomew drove his sister to Oscarey when she asked him to. They went on a Monday, which was his free day, leaving early in the morning to avoid the Dublin traffic. He didn’t know the purpose of their journey, hadn’t yet been told, but Hester quite often didn’t reveal her intentions, and he knew that eventually she would. It didn’t occur to him to make the connection he might have.

‘There’s a man called Flewett,’ Hester said in the car, reading the name from her own handwriting on a scrap of paper. ‘He’ll tell us.’

‘What, though, Hester?’

She said then – a little, not much, not everything. The small church at Oscarey that had served a purpose in the past was being talked about again. A deprived Church of Ireland community, among it the descendants of indoor servants, gardeners and estate workers, was without a convenient means of worship. A consecrated building was mouldering through disuse.

They drove through Blessington, Bartholomew’s very old A-30 van – used mainly for his Saturday trips to the mountains – making a tinny sound he hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t mention it but went on, hoping it was nothing much.

‘It came to me,’ Hester said.

‘Who’s Flewett, though?’

‘One of the people around.’

She didn’t say how she had heard about this man or offer further information about him.

‘We’ll see what Mr Flewett has to say,’ she said.

Conversation with Hester was often like that; Bartholomew was used to it. Details withheld or frugally proffered made the most of what was imparted, as if to imbue communication with greater interest. Strangers sometimes assumed this to be so, only to realize a little later that Hester was not in the least concerned with such pandering: it was simply a quirk - without a purpose – that caused her to complicate conversation in this manner. She didn’t know where it came from and did not ever wonder.

‘What d’you think?’ Bartholomew asked the man at the garage where he stopped for petrol, and the man said the tinny noise could be anything.

‘Would you rev the engine for me?’ he suggested, opening the bonnet when he’d finished at the petrol pump. ‘Give her the full throttle, sir,’ he instructed, and then, ‘D’you know what I’m going to tell you, sir? The old carburettor in this one’s a bit shook. Ease her down now, sir, till we’ll take a look.’

Bartholomew did so, then turned the engine off. As he understood it, the carburettor had loosened on its fixing. Adjusting a monkey wrench, the man said it would take two seconds to put right, and when it was done he wouldn’t charge for it, although Bartholomew pressed him to.

‘There was a line or two about Oscarey in the Gazette,’ Hester said as they drove off again, referring to the magazine that was a source of Church of Ireland news. ‘They’re managing with a recorded service.’