Selected Stories полностью

Corry was glad of the tea, which was strong and hot. The biscuit he took had gone soft, but even so he liked it. Once in a while Nuala bought the same kind for the children.

‘What a lovely surprise!’ Mrs Falloway said.

‘I wondered were you still here.’

‘I’m here for ever now, I think.’

A dismal look had crept into her face, as if she knew why he had come. If she’d thought about it, she would have guessed long ago about the plight they were in. He wasn’t here to say it was her fault; he hoped she didn’t think that, because of course it wasn’t. All the blame was his.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t manage to pay anything back,’ he said.

‘You weren’t expected to, Corry.’

She was a tall woman, seeming fragile now. When she’d been younger her appearance had been almost intimidating: determination had influenced the set of her features and seemed to be there again in her wide mouth and saucer eyes, in her large hands as they gestured for attention. Swiftly her smile had become stern or insistent; now it was vaguely beseeching; her piled-up hair, which Corry remembered as black with a few strands of grey, had no black left in it. There was a tattered look about her that went with the room they were in.

‘You have children now, Corry?’

‘We have three. Two boys and a girl.’

‘You’re finding work?’

He shook his head. ‘It never got going,’ he said. ‘All that.’

‘I’m sorry, Corry.’

Soon after Mrs Falloway bought Mountroche House and came to live there she had attended the funeral of the elderly widow who’d been the occupant of the Mountroche gate-lodge. Being, as she put it, a black Protestant from England, who had never, until then, entered an Irish Catholic church, she had not before been exposed to such a profusion of plaster statues as at that funeral Mass. I hope you do not consider it interference from an outsider, she wrote in her first letter to Bishop Walshe, but it is impossible not to be aware of the opportunity there is for young craftsmen and artists. With time on her hands, she roved Bishop Walshe’s diocese in her Morris Minor, taking photographs of grottoes that featured solitary Virgin Marys or pietàs, or towering crucifixions. How refreshing it would be, she enthused to Bishop Walshe when eventually she visited him, to see the art of the great high crosses of Ireland brought into the modern Church, to see nativities and annunciations in stained glass, to have old lecterns and altar furniture replaced with contemporary forms. She left behind in the Bishop’s hall a selection of postcards she had obtained from Italy, reproductions of the bas-reliefs of Mino da Fiesole and details from the pulpit in Siena cathedral. When she had compiled a list of craftsmen she wrote to all of them, and visited those who lived within a reasonable distance of Mountroche House. To numerous priests and bishops she explained that what was necessary was to bring wealth and talent together; but for the most part she met with opposition and indifference. Several bishops wrote back crossly, requesting her not to approach them again.

Breaking in half another biscuit, Corry remembered the letter he had received himself. ‘Will you look at this!’ he had exclaimed the morning it arrived. Since he had begun to carve figures in his spare time at the joinery he had been aware of a vocation, of wishing to make a living in this particular way, and Mrs Falloway’s letter reflected entirely what he felt: that the church art with which he was familiar was of poor quality. ‘Who on earth is she?’ he wondered in bewilderment when he’d read the letter through several times. Less than a week later Mrs Falloway came to introduce herself.

‘I’ve always been awfully sorry,’ she repeated now. ‘Sorrier than I can say.’

‘Ah, well.’

When it was all over, all her efforts made, her project abandoned, Mrs Falloway had written in defeat to a friend of her distant schooldays. Well, yes, I am giving up the struggle. There is a long story to tell, which must wait until next you come for a few summer weeks. Enough to say, that everything has changed in holy Ireland. Mrs Falloway spoke of that to Corry now, of her feelings at the time, which she had not expressed to him before. The Church had had enough on its hands, was how she put it; the appearance of things seemed trivial compared with the falling away of congregations and the tide of secular attack. Without knowing it, she had chosen a bad time.

‘It was guilt when I gave you that poor little house, Corry. I’d misled you with my certainties that weren’t certainties at all. A galumphing English woman!’

‘Ah no, no.’