Selected Stories

Bartholomew stood up. He held out his hand, and then Mr Flewett shook Hester’s hand too.

‘I meant it in my letter,’ he said. ‘Come any time. I’m always here. People will be pleased you came.’

Hester nodded. She had a way sometimes of not smiling and she didn’t now. But she nodded again as if to make up for that.

In the car Bartholomew said: ‘What letter?’

Hester didn’t answer. Preoccupied, she stared ahead. It was February, too soon for spring, but fine.

‘Did you write to him, Hester?’

‘The little piece in the Gazette was about that woman leaving money and the house. It gave his name.’

Bartholomew said nothing. His sister did things for the best: he’d always known that. It sometimes didn’t seem so, but he knew it was.

‘Will we have another look at the church?’ she said.

He drew in when they came to it. The hump of earth they’d noticed, the newest of the graves, was just beginning to green over and had been tended, the grass clipped in a rectangle round it.

‘I hope they know what they’re doing,’ Hester said, pushing open the heavy west door. ‘I’d keep it locked myself.’

The missionary leaflets by the collection box were smeared and dog-eared, and Bartholomew noticed now that there was bird-lime on curtains that were there instead of a door to the vestry.

‘I’d get rid of that coconut matting,’ Hester said.

They didn’t stop on the way back to Dublin. Hester was quiet, as often she was, not saying anything until they were in Maunder Street. ‘I have eggs I could scramble,’ she said then, and Bartholomew followed her through the empty rooms.

‘How long have you left here?’ he asked, and his sister said until the end of next week. There’d been a place near Fairview Park and he asked about it. No good, she said, Drumcondra the same.

‘I’m sorry you’re having difficulties. I’ve kept an eye out.’

‘The Gas Board’ll have me back. Someone they weren’t expecting to left.’

‘Well, there’s that at least.’

Hester was not enthusiastic. She didn’t say, but Bartholomew knew. In the denuded kitchen he watched while she broke the yolks of the eggs with a fork, beating them up, adding milk and butter, then sprinkling on pepper. Since their childhood he had resented, without saying it, her interference, her indignation on his behalf, her possessiveness. He had forgiven what she couldn’t help, doing so as natural in him as scorn and prickliness were in her. She had never noticed, had never been aware of how he felt.

‘You’d take to Oscarey,’ Hester said.

Before Bartholomew and his sister made their lives at Oscarey, there was an inevitability about the course of events. In private, Bartholomew did not think about what was happening in terms of Hester, considering rather that this was what had been ordained for him, that Hester’s ordering of the circumstances was part of that. Fifteen years ago, when Sally Carbery had decided against marriage at the last minute it was because she feared Hester. She had been vague when suddenly she was doubtful, and was less truthful than she might have been. Unaware of that at the time, Bartholomew was bewildered; later he came to believe that in influencing Sally Carbery’s second thoughts Hester had, then too, been assigned a role in the pattern conceived by a greater wisdom. ‘Silly’, Hester’s word for Sally Carbery had been, even before Sally Carbery and Bartholomew loved one another.

The Church approved the rescuing of Oscarey; and it was anticipated, as Mr Flewett had surmised, that when old Canon Furney died the benefice of Clonbyre, Nead and Oscarey would become one again, that the unnecessarily spacious, draughty rectory in poor repair at Clonbyre would be abandoned in favour of a smaller, more comfortable one at Oscarey. This came about, and the manner in which human existence – seeming to be shaped by the vagaries of time and chance but in fact obedient to a will – became the subject of more than one of Bartholomew’s sermons. Verses of the scriptures were called upon to lend credence to his conclusions, which more than anything else claimed that the mysterious would never be less than mysterious, would always be there, at the heart of spiritual life. That the physical presence of things, and of words and people, amounted to very little made perfect sense to Bartholomew.