Echoes (24 page)

“Why on earth do you not put it all in the post office?” Emer was amused.

“Because I wouldn't give it to that demon Mrs. Conway to know how much I
have
managed to put by over the years. No, honestly, Emer, I really do have the money, thank you and Kevin very much, and I don't spend much on clothes so I'm fine. I was always hoping that I'd have a great opportunity like this.”

Emer blinked away tears. Angela looked so sad lying on her elbow in the divan bed, her long brown hair brushed and tied loosely back with a rubber band, her face pale and worried looking. Emer felt guilty that her friend had such a sad life and was now spending her savings coming to Rome. Yet Angela seemed absolutely determined to be there, from the very first moment too. It was almost as if she had been looking for an excuse to go there and this was it. It was marvelous to have such enthusiasm as that, compared to everyone else moping and complaining. Emer drifted off to sleep happily, and didn't know that Angela smoked five cigarettes hoping that sleep would come, and when it didn't she took half a sleeping tablet with a sip of water.

 

They were meeting the best man in Rome, and so the party that set out on the plane were Kevin's cousin Marie who worked for Aer Lingus and could get a reduction, and Emer's uncle David who was an artist of some kind and who went to the Continent once a year to paint. It had all been balanced with great care. One relative from each side but no mothers or fathers, no clerics or nuns from either side and no sisters or brothers. Emer provided a bridesmaid, and the best man who was working his way there by train was a friend of Kevin's and a teacher in the same school.

There had been a full day of discussion about whether the parents should come, but Kevin and Emer while pretending a certain enthusiasm had marshaled every possible argument against their making the journey. It worked. They were through the barrier at Colinstown airport in Dublin, with Angela, Uncle David and Kevin's cousin Marie. The wedding had begun. He was waiting outside her hotel. She had
told
him not to come in person—it was a hotel where Irish pilgrims stayed, but he should leave a note for her saying where they should meet.

The taxi that Father Flynn had organized for Uncle David, Cousin Marie and Angela stopped outside the door. Sean jumped eagerly but Angela motioned him angrily away. Her first shock was that he was wearing a blue suit with a pale blue shirt open at the neck. It had never occurred to her that he didn't dress like a priest anymore.

David and Marie spent ages being assured that she was fine, that she had her passport, which she would need, that they knew of her at the desk, and then they all repeated to each other where they were going to meet for lunch the next day. At the foot of the Spanish Steps, on the bottom step, that way nobody could get lost.

Angela stiffened as she was aware of Sean listening eagerly to the arrangements. She wanted to keep him out of it, she wanted the two lives separate. She
hated
him for standing there mute and dying to join in. She hated herself too for keeping him at such a distance with a wave of her hand. Eventually, finally they went, back into the taxi and on to the hotel where Father Flynn and the happy couple had gone. Where the best man should be arriving tonight if all went well. Emer had been upset that Angela couldn't change her arrangements and stay at their hotel too, and that she wouldn't even try. But Angela had insisted that the booking remain the way it was. They would see plenty of each other, the hotels were only ten minutes' walk apart.

She was given the key to her room and pointed towards a very dangerous-looking lift. Sean came towards her.

“Are they gone?” he asked fearfully.

“Yes.”

“Oh Angela.
Angela.
Thank you, bless you for coming, bless you, and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Shuya says I must begin by giving you her thanks. She wants you to know that very specially.” He had his hands on her shoulders and his face was working uncontrollably.

“Don't . . .” she began.

“If you had any idea what this means to me.” He shook his head from side to side. There
were
tears in his eyes, she hadn't been mistaken.

“Please . . . I'll just go and . . .” She wanted to give him time to pull himself together, to stop this fawning tearful act, so unlike her confident brother the priest who was always so right and who knew what people should do and what they shouldn't do, and who knew about duty and staying with one's mother in Castlebay for all of one's life.

“I'll come with you.” He lifted the suitcase.

“No, you can't. What would they think?” She hissed this furiously at him.

In easy Italian he explained to the small fat man behind the desk. The man nodded,
Si si.
Father Sean could still charm them, Angela thought bitterly.

There was barely room to breathe in the perilous lift. Angela held her breath as it groaned up the flights. Sean opened the door of the small room. There was a single bed, a dressing table and a chair. On the wall were five hooks with hangers on them. Single rooms didn't have luxuries like wardrobes or washbasins. They had passed rooms called
Il Bagno
and
Il Gabinetto
on the corridor. Angela looked around her, this wasn't how she had wanted to meet her brother. She had wanted to come in and lie down and gather her thoughts. She had wanted to have a bath and change her clothes, hanging up her wedding finery and the new hat bought in Clery's this morning. Was it only
this
morning they had been in O'Connell Street with all those crowds? She had wanted Sean to leave her a letter suggesting a nearby café. She could have strolled there in the cool of the evening and they could have talked at a quiet table. Talked for hours if need be. She hated this hot, emotional, awkward meeting.

He had put her case on the floor and laid the big bag carrying her wedding hat carefully on the dressing table beside the big room key. And as she stood not knowing what was going to happen now, totally out of control on her first time staying in a hotel, her first time out of Ireland and her first time meeting her only brother since he had left the priesthood, Sean put his arms around her and with his head on her shoulder he cried like a baby. She stood there dry-eyed, wondering how could anything be as bad as this. He wasn't stammering how sorry he was that it had all happened, he wasn't saying that he had made a mess of everyone's lives. No, he was stumbling out words about the laicization and how long it was taking, and how glad he was to see Angela because he had been so afraid from her letters that she meant he was never to come back to Castlebay again.

 

They all found the Spanish Steps with no problem. Marie, the girl who worked in Aer Lingus, had been in Rome several times, and David the middle-aged artist had been there years ago. Emer and Kevin would have found the planet Mars if that had been the rendezvous point, so excited and full of energy did they seem. Father Flynn was excited too— this was
his
show, his town now, and he loved every minute of the role of organizer. Angela was the last to arrive but she was only minutes after the others. She had paused to buy dark glasses and had found herself always in the kind of shop where these glasses cost a fortune. In the end she paid a fortune, and the woman in the shop admired them and said that now she had a
bella figura.

The others laughed when they saw the new Angela. They told her that it had not taken her long to go native and they joked about overindulgence in wine the night before. As they debated where to eat Emer asked Angela in some concern what she
had
done the night before.

“Wandered,” Angela said. “You know me, wander and only half absorb where I am and what I'm doing. It's a beautiful place, isn't it?” Emer was satisfied. Years and years ago in Dublin, Angela used to wander like that, for ages along the canal, or in the Dublin mountains, walking around for miles. It figured she would do the same in Rome. Emer went back to the argument about lunch, they dismissed the very notion of Babbington's Tea Rooms, an English-style place just beside them. They hadn't been in Rome for a full day yet, it wasn't long enough for them to start hankering over good old tea and scones.

They walked companionably to a place that Father Flynn knew. “I haven't completely wasted my time here praying and studying,” he said happily. “I've done some useful things like discovering where to eat and drink.”

A man in a cream-colored jacket and a very showy handkerchief in his pocket made a play for Angela in the restaurant, jumping up from his table to ensure she had an ashtray and trying out his few lamentable words of English on her.

“I think these glasses suit me. I might wear them all the time,” Angela said when the man had backed out of the restaurant bowing and smiling and ogling. She hadn't seen that much attention in years.

Then they left her alone. Once she had made a little joke they thought she was all right, she could opt out for a while and run the whole night over for herself as if it were a film. She had got Sean out of her room eventually, and he had written down the name of a café. She said she only needed an hour to calm herself and unpack; but as it turned out she did neither, her clothes remained in their suitcase and her anxiety grew ever more. She kept looking at the traveling clock and wondering why she had sent her brother, red-eyed, away. She was going to have to talk to him anyway, why hadn't she left the oppressive bedroom with him and gone to one of those picturesque squares?

They did walk to a square, the Piazza Navona. There were restaurants all around and the center was full of people selling things and doing tricks as if it was a carnival. Not a person seemed to have a care except the O'Haras, she thought. They sat and ordered tiny coffees.

He had recovered himself fully. “Let me tell you all about my family,” he began. She listened. She heard of Shuya and how he had met her almost immediately after they had gone to Japan to regroup after the expulsion from China; she heard of Denis, who was three and the brightest child that had ever been known. And of Laki, who was a baby of eighteen months, so beautiful it would make your eyes prickle when you saw her. And of the life they lived in Japan in Shuya's brother's house, and what they did here in the strange villa in Ostia, and how they would get married here in Rome as soon as the laicization came through. He talked like someone possessed: he had always been a great one to hold the floor, but that was because he was the only one who could, at home. He had been away to seminary and then on the missions; he was a priest of God who had more right to tell tales and get a hearing, who had better tales to tell. She listened. Nothing had changed much except the content. He was sure of his audience, sure that she was glad to know details of Laki's birth which had been a complicated one, sure that she was as absorbed as he was in the minutiae of the laicization process and his dealings with the Congregation for the Clergy.

Once or twice she tried to interject, but he raised his hand slightly in that clerical gesture which was only slightly a courteous request for permission to speak further—it was mainly a statement that he was
going
to speak further.

He wasn't going to go back tonight: it was too far, it would be too late. He would stay in Rome. Shuya had insisted, said it would be less tiring because surely he would want to talk to his sister again in the morning. As the monologue went on Angela became grateful that he was going to stay in Rome. Since she was obviously not going to get any innings at all, she would
need
the morning to try to explain to him some of the things that stood in the way of his sunny view of the future. But where would he stay? Much of his chat had included how short of money they were and how even fares were a big consideration. But he was fine for a bed. A friend of his, an English priest who was staying at the English College, said there would always be a bed there for Sean. It was nearby.

He talked of the priests he had met and the ex-priests, and of the spirit of change and questioning in the Church. He was prepared to talk forever about such things. Angela nodded and made the necessary sounds as he spoke but all the time her mind was racing. It was just like getting his letters; he ignored every point she had made in her own letters, and had written as if Angela had addressed no thoughts, pleas or words to him at all. She had written to say that she was coming to meet him to explain to him face-to-face how impossible it would be—laicization or not—to return to Castlebay with a Japanese or any wife and two children. He seemed to have ignored the main part of her letter, and acknowledged only the first sentence, that she was coming to Rome to see him.

She hoped that a change of venue might change the tack of the conversation, so she suggested they have a meal. He hesitated. Angela said she would be glad to pay. He agreed. It was just that he felt so guilty spending anything on himself instead of on Shuya and the children. But nothing changed, he ordered for them in perfect Italian, bottles of mineral water as well as wine; told her he could make spaghetti thirty-four different ways now, and he made a salad every evening at home, often with leaves they plucked from the garden. You can actually eat
all
kinds of things like the leaves of flowers. Did Angela know that?

She didn't, but by the end of the evening, she knew a lot of things like that. She could have gone into Radio Eireann at home and asked to be a panelist on
Information Please
after all she learned in the Piazza Navona, as the lights came on and the musicians played, and other people had beautiful Roman evenings. From her handbag she took a piece of paper and wrote down four words. Then she handed the list to him.

“What's this?” he asked, surprised and even a little amused.