On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland (7 page)

‘Enough! That’ll do, Fr Coy. I see no reason not to write it in the book,’ he said. ‘What date in June, Róisín, were you hoping for?’

‘Excuse me, Father, excuse me, I must insist. My vocation compels me to object in the strongest terms. An altar ceremony would not be proper, not in the eyes of the Church, nor according to – ’

‘Proper! Proper, you say!’ He jumped up, glared at his challenger. ‘In my book, Father, my book,’ he said, jabbing his thumb into his chest, ‘and in the book I follow, living the faith comes first and last. Proper is for smug bishops and the tally-ho set, who’ve both bedevilled this poor country.’ He swept back his prematurely-greying hair and turned to Róisín.

‘Now,
mo chuisle,
let’s see what June looks like and we’ll put your details in.’

‘Parish priest you might be,’ the flushed curate cried, ‘but there’s no call to be disrespectful. You yourself know this is going against diocesan directives. Bishop Buckley is most adamant about this kind of thing.’

‘Right, Father! Enough! As long as I’m in charge here, I’ll decide. Not you. And I’ll deal with Bishop Buckley if it comes to that.’ He whipped off his collar and flung it against the mahogany table, along which it bounced and at the end tumbled to the floor. ‘The man doesn’t know one friggin thing about this little piece of Mayo bogland, never laid eyes on Loch Doog, or Mweelrea. He wouldn’t know Aranroe if it bit him in his arse, whether it’s east or west of the Shannon or north or south of the friggin equator. So, cut the Bishop bulldust, Dick!’

Fr Coy smirked, exhaling loudly.

‘Thanks,’ Róisín whispered. ‘It’s Leonora I care about. I want her, I want her to have a good healthy life.’ She grasped the priest’s hand.

‘Curate I might be.’ The younger priest approached. ‘But Dick Coy has his duty and do it he will.’ He snatched up his black serge overcoat and swerved into the hall. ‘The Bishop will hear about this post haste. This priest will see that he does.’

‘Fr Coy, don’t leave this house! I want a word with you.’ The senior man’s tone bore no hint of concession. His blood-shot eyes swung back to Róisín, then heavenward. ‘Wants to be Pope,’ he whispered, ‘and not a wet day out of the seminary.’ He pressed a finger to his lips and winked back at her before pulling the door behind him.

In the hallway Fr Coy presented a cold face. ‘Don’t try talk me out of this. My decision is made and it’s final. I’ll be respected, Father, and by those in higher places than you. You’ve gone against me for the last time.’

‘Tell me this, Dick: What made you put on that collar? I’m asking you; think about it if you need to. Was it for the love of Jesus Christ and His flock? To heal? Comfort? Help those in need? Or was it power? Or the status that comes with the cloth? Or do you know yet?’

‘Oh, no. Not a chance you’ll bamboozle me with your liberation psychology. It’s priests like me that’ll restore the Church in Ireland, in this very parish, and not too long from now. And not with cry-baby Christianity; you can count on that too. So.’

‘Calm down, Father. I’m offering you an opportunity to take back your threat.’

‘An opportunity? You are offering me an opportunity? Ridiculous, man, the shoe’s on the other foot this time. The bad blood between yourself and Bishop Buckley, it’ll get you shifted before the summer’s out, back to Finglas, or Kilburn.’ A smirk kinked the curate’s lips. ‘Nothing better than a bit of curate’s work, I believe, to re-focus a vocation. I’ll do what’s needed here, have no fear of that, as parish priest.’

‘Listen to me, Dick, there’s – ’

‘Nothing more to say, Liam. Sorry.’ He snapped open the door latch. ‘Dick Coy’s duty is neither deniable nor negotiable. Remember that.’

‘The words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Father. For a different time and place.’

‘And true, still. I’m off.’

‘Hold your friggin horses!’ the senior priest thundered.

The curate poked his head back into the dimly-lit hall. ‘I’ve spoken, the talking is over. I should have done this months ago, when I got here; I see that now. Good night.’

‘Question, Father! Before you fall off your pedastal: Where did you go last night?’

‘What last night? What do you mean, last night?’

‘You heard me. Step back inside, please. Now.’

Fr Coy complied, awkwardly.

‘Well? Where were you?’

‘Last night, Father?’

‘And the previous Thursday night, and the Thursday before that.’

‘Different places. Seeking out my congregation. Doing parish work. I’m not the cleric who keeps spirits in the house.’

‘No, that you’re certainly not. Now answer my question.’

‘This is nonsense. Three, four calls. Of no concern. Parish duties. I’m off now.’ He stepped outside once again into the night air and started to pull the door after him.

‘Between nine o’clock and eleven o’clock p.m.’

‘As I told you, various different duties. I don’t work to my watch.’ He held on to the half-closed door, out of sight of his questioner, his voice tamer now. ‘Anyway, it’s nobody’s, it’s really nobody’s – ’

‘Well, I do know.’ Fr Foley pulled the door in. ‘Force my hand and your purple-hatted pals will know too. Inside, Father.’

‘This is ridiculous, Liam. Really downright ridic – ’

‘No, it’s not. And you know that. You were down at The Terraces. In the company, let’s say, of certain parties I won’t be naming. Unless you leave me no choice. Things going on, Father. Things the good bishop would see you de-frocked for.’ The older priest’s voice cut with a savage ruthlessness. ‘Count on this, Dick: Whisper a word in the wrong place against Róisín Doyle and her wedding – and your collar’s mine. Clear enough?’

‘Yes, Fr Foley.’ The curate mulled back into the hall, his fingers fumbling with the door until the brass bolt drove home.

‘I want what’s going on down there to stop. D’you understand that too? I’ll help you any way I can, but if you’re seen within the vicinity of The Terraces, there’ll be ructions in this holy house. We’ll talk in the morning. Eleven o’clock?’

The curate nodded, then trudged up the unlit staircase.

‘And mark your calendar for June 2nd!’ the parish priest boomed up into the darkness, shattering the rectory’s quiet.

He then sat on the stairs and leaned back with a smile. ‘Kicker Foley to be the celebrant of record,’ he said heavenward. ‘D’you hear that, Tommy? You do, I know you do, y’boyo.’ After a brief lull his words took up again in quiet recitation. ‘The morning of the second of June, Tommy Doyle, in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and sixty-three, your old pal Kicker Foley will marry your Beautiful Dreamer to her American beau, and watch out the cleric of any colour who tries to stop me.’

4

1994

Ireland

Despite persistent catastrophising, he’d made good his escape to California and his departure out of Los Angeles International Airport. Now, one day later, leaving Dublin on a train bound for County Mayo, Tony MacNeill propped his feet on the opposite seat and stretched out.

These were the colours of his memory, he recalled, this country, the tints and tones of an infinite palette, all carved up and spread out and casting spells upon him once again. Like he’d never left. Crowds of grey and white clouds rolled with him, past the greens and yellows of patterned countryside. Then out of the heavens burst a light that stole his soul, a different sun than that in Arizona, a different sky. He was home, for sure. To try again. Tracking the same journey he had made one year ago. This time he’d indulge or escape the woman who had haunted him every day since.

The land imprinted its earthiness on the air flowing through the carriage: mountain mixed with bog and farm, earth and heather and hay, turf and rain; he could smell them all, the land that had provided hope through his solitude. Ireland, again. His too rarely. Now his to explore. What would it hold this time?

About him danced stars of sun-lit dust; and soon the clacking of the near-empty carriage found rhythm in his thoughts. Harmonies, somehow, that bound him to Lenny Quin, a woman he did not yet understand, who had usurped his mind, altered the beating of his days and nights, and now compelled his return to her stony world of sheer cliffs and bottomless lochs, mist-shrouded mountains and soft bogs.

Before him lay wonder and doubt. Danger too, he suspected. As well as he knew this, he knew too that her face and voice had not left him in this endless year. A face that each morning had smiled on him and each evening kissed him, a face that had followed him, implored him, seduced him. Eyes of hope and hurt that left him with nothing except their pursuit of him, and their lure of him into pursuit of her.

This time he had skipped through Dublin, where he’d landed hours earlier. He’d seen little of the city of his birth, just fleeting streetscapes as the airport bus lurched along the Liffey to Heuston Station. There he had boarded the train, a train feeling sometimes like a cave, sometimes a chariot, rolling coast to coast, east to west, across the land. He had wanted earlier to call Kate but needed even more this sense of independence, of navigating solo his own, old country, for a day, maybe two.

His snatched glimpses of Dublin replayed now in his thoughts and an older nostalgia took over, re-immersed him in his childhood. But not even the jangle and glee of those times could detain him long from thoughts of Lenny Quin and what she had done to him.

Meeting her had coincided with a time when he was at last erasing the spectre of Newark, wasteland of his teens. Not that his life had been in any sense sane since at fourteen he’d watched his green island disappear beneath him. But in the last year and a half, in Arizona, virtues he didn’t know he had salvaged, didn’t remember ever owning, had firmed inside him. Now there was more to win, a future, perhaps close, that he wouldn’t miss. Whatever the price.

Gone was his job at the
News Sentinel
, weekend soccer reporter, so be it, he thought. Gone was America, so be it too. No job, no country, could extinguish this flame, his chance to re-find his spirit, light his soul. He would accept what was to come, what it asked of him, for nothing he could imagine could keep him from whatever it was in her that made joy seem attainable. Worth a life. And if it all proved foolish, if this road twisted back to hell, he’d deal with that too. No, no retreat.

* * *

Aranroe, the village where Lenny had appeared, where his obsession started one year ago, lay still three hours to the west. Time for too many replays, and doubts. Despite his fears, he had not the way nor the will to stop his thoughts of her, or of what it was he’d found in her that was always beyond words, this passion possessing him.

Over the windy flatness of the midlands the speeding train swayed side to side, offering him thrills and distraction. He struggled to save faith in his future, beat away dark thoughts. But now his mind blanked out the image of Lenny Quin, blanked out her geometry of curves, the sound of her voice. He re-questioned his being here, locked in this carriage, heading once more for a hilly village beneath great mountains.

Then she re-emerged, teasing his senses, floated into him, and vanished once more. He wrestled his mind down, back to earth, Ireland, his homeland, blood and culture, history, wars on sacred soil, what he and she were part of, those elements they shared: Irishness, roots in this land of suffering that might unite their otherwise foreign lives.

Soon the bogs and meadows of the Midlands gave way to fields of dancing barley and everywhere cattle idling on great green squares. Then came the water, Loch Rea, mile after mile, silver, rippling to the wind. And then Claremorris and the Nephin Begs, purple apogees atop a massive fence. A little later, out of this tapestry Mweelrea shot up, sovereign and welcoming. His heart skipped.

After Westport the train headed west, past rocks and islands being battered by surf. And like a sailor saved, a prodigal forgiven, he found a new belongingness taking hold.

Then Aranroe train station re-entered his reality, one difficult year after he’d first been here. He stepped down onto the flagstone platform. The old bowing bench, still unpainted, sat empty, no William to admonish or entertain him. Somehow it didn’t feel right to go in search of the old man.

‘
Dia is Mhuire dhuit.
’

A voice calling. From behind him. He couldn’t turn.

‘
Dia is Mhuire dhuit.
’

The voice took form. A woman, approaching, wearing William’s de Gaulle cap, middle-aged, chaotic charcoal mane, magenta face.

‘Don’t speak Gaelic. Sorry.’

‘Can’t say I do myself, ha-ha. A few words I collected,’ the woman said. ‘Impresses the tourists like mad, especially the Germans. And no better way to shame the Brits; pay them back any way you can; that’s what I say. You look lost; you’re American, are you; do you know where it is at all you are?’

‘No. I mean yes, I do know. I’ve been here before.’

‘You look lost to me. Was it looking for William you were?’

‘Is he here?’

‘Well, he is, you could say, and he isn’t. Isn’t his spirit all over the place, looking at us this minute, I wouldn’t doubt. And where else would he be, and him looking after his trains going on sixty-one years.’

‘You mean, he passed away?’

‘In a way he did, but away couldn’t be far for himself. I’d wager he walks about here all the time, and sits next to his old stove inside. He’s here alright, for his trains, and all his friends.’

‘Sorry to hear . . . When did he pass away?’

‘Christmas day. In the chapel after Mass he left us, the morning of his eighty-ninth birthday. He planned it that way, I’d say, natural as it was. He was like that. Did everything his own way in living, so why not in dying.’

‘You knew him, knew him well, I mean?’

‘Well as any daughter knows her father – ’

‘Your father?’

‘Didn’t we live under the same roof these last twenty-eight years, since the mother died. Now there was a woman for you, the mother; she’d have sixteen cows washed and milked before you’d – ’

‘Sorry, I’m not being rude but I need to check into my B&B; they might rent the room to someone else.’