Justina passed on. She had spoken to Maeve about the peaches and her sister hadn’t said anything. But Mr Gilfoyle had heard her saying it and he’d laughed. When Micksie came in he said that if the dinge in the tin caused rust you’d have to be careful. Micksie was Maeve’s husband, Mr Gilfoyle was his father. Diamond Street was where they lived, where Maeve ruled the small household and most of the time was unable to hide the fact that she resented its composition. Capable and brisk of manner, a tall, dark-haired childless woman, Maeve considered that she’d been caught: when their mother had died there had been only she to look after Justina, their mother being widowed for as long as either of them could remember. And Maeve had been caught again when her father-in-law, miserable with the ailments of old age, had to be taken in; and again in not realizing before her marriage that Micksie had to be kept out of the pubs. ‘Oh, I have children all right,’ was how she often put it when there was sympathy for her childlessness.
Justina bought an ice-cream in the Today Tonight shop. The evening papers had just come off the Dublin bus.
‘You’re a great girl,’ one of two nuns remarked, reaching out for Kerrygold and dropping it into her wire basket. Older and more severe, the other nun didn’t say anything.
‘Ah, I’m not,’ Justina said. She held out her ice-cream, but neither nun licked it. ‘No way I’m great,’ Justina said.
‘What kept you?’ Maeve asked in the kitchen.
‘Mrs Scally was on about the peaches. Sister Agnes and Sister Lull were in the Today Tonight.’
‘What’d you go in there for?’
‘Nothing.’
Justina paused for an instant and then she told about the ice-cream and Maeve knew it was because her sister had suddenly considered it would be a lie to hold that back.
‘God, will you look at the cut of you!’ She shouted, furious, unable to help herself. ‘Aren’t there jobs to do here without you’re streeling about the town?’
‘I had to make my confession.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’
‘What’s up, Maeve?’
Maeve shook her head. She could feel a weariness in her eyes which made her want to close them, and then felt it spreading through her body. She returned to what she’d been doing before Justina came in, slicing cooked potatoes.
‘Lay the table,’ she said. ‘Take your anorak off and lay the table.’
‘I got a letter from Breda,’ Justina said.
She had closed the back door behind her but hadn’t come further into the kitchen. She had a way of doing that, just as she had a way of standing by the sink, not getting on with what she was there for, as if she’d forgotten everything. All their lives, for as long as Maeve could remember, she had been irritated by this shortcoming in her sister, as she was by Justina’s bringing back messages from the shopkeepers to say this or that commodity had come in or that there was a new bargain line, as she was by the telephone calls that came from a farmer nearly six miles from the town to say that Justina was again feeding his bullocks bunches of grass. Not that he objected, the man always said, only the bullocks could be frisky and maybe crowd her.
‘Will you read me Breda’s letter, Maeve?’
‘You keep away from that one, d’you hear me?’
‘Sure, Breda’s gone.’
‘And she’ll stay where she is.’
‘Will I lay the table, Maeve?’
‘Didn’t I ask you to?’
‘I’ll lay it so.’
Father Clohessy walked in the opposite direction from the one taken by Justina. The sense of loss that had possessed him when she left the church had given way to a more general feeling of deprivation that, these days, he was not often without. The grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been. He had seen his congregations fall off and struggled against the feeling that he’d been deserted. Confusion spread from the mores of the times into the Church itself; in combating it, he prayed for guidance but was not heard.
