When the dormitory had quietened Olivier thought about her again. He wondered how, when she was young, her expression had changed when her mood did. He imagined her demure, for there was about her sometimes in the dining hall a trace of that as she stood waiting for Grace to be said, while the others were impatient. Conjecturing again, he saw her in a different coat, without a headscarf, hair blown about. He saw her uniform laid out, starched and ready on an ironing board, a finger damped before the iron’s heat was tested. He saw her stockinged feet and laughter in her eyes, and then her nakedness.
Only Justina Casey made sense, Father Clohessy reflected yet again, shaking his head over the recurrence of the thought, for truth to tell the girl made no sense at all. The contradiction nagged a little in a familiar way, as it did whenever Justina Casey, sinless as ever, made her confession. It caused Father Clohessy to feel inadequate, foolish even, that he failed to understand something that as a priest he should have.
Leaving the confessional she had just left herself, he looked around for her: at the back, near the holy-water stoup, she trailed her rosary through her fingers. ‘Father, I’m bad,’ she had insisted and, allotting her her penance, he had been again aware that she didn’t even know what badness was. But without the telling of her beads, without the few Hail Marys he had prescribed, she would have gone away unhappy. Of her own volition, every few days she polished the brass of the altar vases and the altar cross. She would be there on Saturday evening, a bucket of scalding water carried through the streets, the floor mop lifted down from its hook in the vestry cupboard. On Fridays she scraped away the week’s accumulation of candle grease and arranged to her satisfaction the out-of-date missionary leaflets.
Fifty-four and becoming stout, his red hair cut short around a freckled pate, Father Clohessy watched while Justina Casey dipped the tips of her fingers in the holy water and blessed herself before she left the church. Her footsteps were soft on the tiles, as if her devotion demanded that, as if she were of less importance than the sacred ground she walked on, less than the burning candles and the plaster Virgin, less even than the unread missionary leaflets. He remembered her at her First Communion, standing out a bit from the other children, a scraggy bunch of lily-of-the-valley pressed close to her. It was afterwards that she’d asked him if she could look after the brass.
The door of the church closed soundlessly behind her and Father Clohessy was aware of an emptiness, of something taken from him.
Justina dawdled, examining the goods in the shop windows. There were the tins of sweets in Hehir’s, and the glass jars in a row behind them, half full of the mixtures, the jelly babies and bull’s-eyes, soft-centred fruits, toffees. There were the fashions in Merrick’s, the window changed only a week ago, meat in Cranly’s, delft and saucepans in Natton’s. A fine dust had gathered on the dry goods in MacGlashan’s, on packets of Barry’s tea and the advertisements for Bisto and chicken-and-ham paste. Cabbage drooped outside Mrs Scally’s, the green fringe of the carrots was tinged with yellow.
‘How’s Justina?’ Mrs Scally enquired from the doorway, the flowered overall that encased her girth crossed over on itself beneath her folded arms. She always had her arms folded, Justina’s thought was as she stopped to hear what else Mrs Scally had to say. One shoulder taking the weight against the door-jamb, a single curler left in her hair, slippers on her feet and the folded arms: that was Mrs Scally unless she was weighing out potatoes or wrapping a turnip. ‘All right,’ Justina said. ‘I’m all right, Mrs Scally.’
‘I have apples in. Will you tell them up in the house I have apples in?’
‘I will.’
‘There’s a few tins of peaches that’s dinged. I wouldn’t charge the full.’
‘You told me that, Mrs Scally.’
‘Did you mention it in the house?’
‘I did surely.’
