Silver Wedding (17 page)

His father was now white-haired, still a handsome man. He was sixty-three now, forty-two years older than his boy. Alan Black had always said that it didn’t matter whether you were eighteen years older than your son or forty-eight years older, you were still a different generation. But that in his case it had been everything and more than he had hoped, the boy had never wanted a motorbike, hadn’t taken drugs or brought hordes of undesirables back to the home. He had been a model son.

His mother Laura looked well on the Conferring day. She didn’t twitter like other mothers did about having produced a son who could write Bachelor of Civil Law after his name and who would shortly be
admitted
to the Incorporated Law Society as a solicitor as well. Laura wore a bright pink scarf at the neck of her smart navy suit. She had spent what she considered a great deal of money on a haircut, and her grey hair looked elegant and well shaped. She did not look fifty-six years of age but she did look the picture of happiness. As the crowds milled around the university campus she grasped her brother by the arm.

‘I almost feel that I’ve been too lucky, Jimbo,’ she said, her face serious. ‘Why should God have given me all this happiness when He doesn’t give it to everyone else?’

Father Hurley, who certainly did not look his fifty-one years either, begged her to believe that God’s love was there for everyone, it was a matter of how they received it. Laura had always been an angel to everyone, it was just and good that she should be given happiness in this life as well as in the next.

He meant it, every single word. His eye fell on a woman with a tired face and a son in a wheelchair. They had come to watch a daughter be conferred. There was no man with them.

Perhaps she too had been an angel, Father James Hurley thought. But it was too complicated to work out why God hadn’t dealt her a better hand in this life. He would not think about it now.

They had lunch in one of the best hotels. People at several tables seemed to know Father Hurley, he
introduced
his family with pride, the well-dressed sister and brother-in-law. The bright handsome young man.

A Mrs O’Hagan and a Mrs Barry, two ladies treating themselves to a little outing, seemed very pleased to meet the nephew of whom they had heard so much. Father Hurley wished they wouldn’t go on about how often and how glowingly he had mentioned the young man. It made him feel somehow that he had no other topic of conversation.

Gregory was able to take it utterly in his stride. As they sat down at their own table he grinned conspiratorially at his uncle.

‘Talk about me being good at public relations, you’re the genius, just feed them a little bit of harmless family information from time to time and they think they know all about you. You’re cute as a fox, Uncle Jim.’

It was rescue from being thought to be the gossipy overfond uncle, certainly, but it did seem to classify him as something else. Something a bit shallow.

Gregory Black decided that he would practise law in Dublin for a few years in order to get experience. Make all his mistakes on strangers rather than his father’s clients, he said. Even his old grandfather now in his late eighties and long retired from the firm thought this was a good idea, and his uncle who had no children of his own. His parents accepted it with a good grace.

‘It would be ridiculous to keep him down in a backwater after he’s been so long on his own in Dublin,’ Laura told her brother. ‘And any way he says he’ll come down and see us a lot.’

‘Does he just think that or will he really?’ Father Hurley asked.

‘Oh he will, the only thing that made it difficult for him when he was a student was all the train and bus travel. Now he’ll have a car it will be different.’

‘A car of his own?’

‘Yes, it’s Alan’s promise. If he got a good degree a car of his own!’ She was bursting with pride.

And Gregory’s gratitude was enormous. He embraced them all with pleasure. His father, gruff with delight, said that of course in time Gregory would change this model and trade it in for another smarter kind. But for the moment … perhaps …

Gregory said he would drive it until it was worn out. Father James Hurley felt his heart fill up with relief and pleasure that this dark eager young man should know how much love and need encircled him, and respond to it so well.

His parents went back happily to the country, his uncle went happily back to the presbytery and the boy was free to do what he wanted with his life, with a brand-new car to help him on the way.

And Gregory did indeed visit home, he drove smartly in the entrance of the gate lodge and fondled the ears of the collie dogs, children and
even
grandchildren of the original collies that his mother had loved so much. He would talk to his father about the law and to his mother about his social life in Dublin.

He seemed to have lots of friends – men and women, Laura told her brother eagerly – they went to each other’s houses and they even cooked meals for each other. Sometimes she baked a steak and kidney pie for him to take up to his flat, she always gave him bread and slices of good country ham, and bacon, and pounds of butter. Once or twice James Hurley wondered what did she think they sold in shops around the bedsitterland where his nephew lived, but he didn’t ever say anything. His sister loved the feeling that she was still looking after the big handsome son she had produced. Why disturb that good warm feeling? To use his nephew’s own words, ‘it wouldn’t make sense’.

He hardly ever coincided with Gregory back down home because the priest was never free at weekends, Saturdays were busy with Confessions and house calls, Sundays with the parish Masses, the sick calls and the evening Benediction. But when he did get back himself mid week for an overnight now and then he was pleased to see that the pleasure of the visits totally outweighed what might be considered the selfish attitudes of their only son.

Laura talked delightedly of how Gregory had this big red laundry bag she had made him and often he
just
ran into the kitchen and stuffed all the contents into her washing machine.

She said this proudly as if it had taken some effort. She mentioned not at all that it was she who took them out and hung them up to dry, she who ironed and folded the shirts and had an entire laundry ready packed on the back seat of his car for his return journey.

Alan talked about how Gregory loved coming to have Saturday dinner with them in the golf club, how he appreciated the good wines and nice food that were served there.

Father Hurley wondered why Gregory hadn’t on some occasions at least put his mother and father into the car they had bought him and driven them to one of the hotels nearby to treat them to a dinner.

But as usual it made no sense to bring up something so negative. And he remembered with some guilt that he had never thought of treating his sister in the old days. He had a vow of poverty perhaps on his side, but there were things he hadn’t thought of then. Maybe it was the same in all young men.

And Gregory was great company. He could talk a lot without saying anything, something that could be a compliment or an insult. In Gregory’s case it was something to be admired, praised and enjoyed.

Sometimes Gregory went swimming with his uncle out in Sandycove at the Forty Foot, the men’s bathing place. Sometimes he called in to have a drink in the
presbytery
, where he would raise the nice crystal Waterford glass to the evening light and admire the golden whiskey reflecting in the midst of all the little twinkling shapes of glass.

‘Great thing this ascetic life,’ Gregory would say, laughing.

You couldn’t take offence at him, and it would only be a very churlish person who would notice that he never brought a bottle of whiskey with him to add to the store, ascetic or not.

Father Hurley was totally unprepared for a visit from Gregory in the middle of the night.

‘I’m in a bit of trouble, Jim,’ he said straight away. No Uncle, no sorry for getting you out of bed at three a.m.

Father Hurley managed to shoo the elderly parish priest and the equally elderly housekeeper back to their respective quarters. ‘It’s an emergency, I’ll deal with it,’ he soothed them. By the time he got into the sitting room he saw that Gregory had helped himself to a large drink. The boy’s eyes were too bright, he had sweat on his brow, he looked as if he had already had plenty to drink.

‘What happened?’

‘A bloody bicycle swerved out at me, no proper light, no reflecting clothes, nothing. Bloody fools, they should be prosecuted, they should have special lanes for them like they do on the continent.’

‘What happened?’ The priest repeated the words.

‘I don’t know.’ Gregory looked very young.

‘Well is he all right, was he hurt?’

‘I didn’t stop.’

Father Hurley stood up. His legs weren’t steady enough to hold him. He sat down again.

‘But was he injured, did he fall? Mother of God, Gregory, you never left him there on the side of the road?’

‘I had to, Uncle Jim. I was over the limit. Way over the limit.’

‘Where is he, where did it happen?’

Gregory told him, a stretch of dark road on the outskirts of Dublin.

‘What took you up there?’ the priest asked. It was irrelevant but he didn’t feel he yet had the strength to stand up and go to the phone to let the guards and the ambulance know there had been an accident.

‘I thought it was safer to come back that way, less chance of being stopped. You know, breathalyzed.’ Gregory looked up, like the way he had looked up when he had forgotten to take one of the dogs for a walk, or hadn’t closed a gate up in a far field.

But this time a cyclist lay on the road in the dark.

‘Please tell me, Gregory, tell me what you think happened.’

‘I don’t know. Jesus, I don’t know, I felt the bike.’ He stopped. His face was blank.

‘And then …’

‘I don’t know, Uncle Jim. I’m frightened.’

‘So am I,’ said James Hurley.

He picked up the phone.

‘Don’t, don’t!’ screamed his nephew. ‘For God’s sake you’ll ruin me.’

James Hurley had dialled the guards.

‘Shut up, Gregory,’ he said. ‘I’m not giving them your name, I’m sending them to the accident, then I’ll go myself.’

‘You can’t … you can’t …’

‘Goodnight Sergeant, it’s Father Hurley from the presbytery here, I’ve had a message, a very urgent one, there’s been an accident …’ He gave the road and the area. He thought the time was in the last half hour or so. He looked over at Gregory, the boy nodded miserably.

‘Yes, it seems it was a hit and run.’

The words had a disgusting finality about them. This time Gregory didn’t even lift his head.

‘No, Sergeant, I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry, it was reported to me in the nature of confession. That’s all I can say. I’m going out there now to see what happened to the unfortunate …’

‘No, it was just confessed to me, I know nothing about any car or who the person was.’

Father Hurley went for his coat. He caught a sight of his nephew’s face and the relief that flooded it.

Gregory looked up at him gratefully.

‘I never thought of that, but of course it makes
sense
, you
can’t
really tell because of the seal of Confession.’

‘It wasn’t Confession, I could tell but I’m not going to.’

‘You couldn’t break the sacred …’

‘Shut your face …’

This was a different uncle than he had ever seen before.

He took a small bag with him in case he would have to administer the last sacrament to a seriously injured victim on the side of a dark road outside Dublin.

‘What will I do?’

‘You will walk home. And you will go to bed.’

‘And the car?’ ‘I will deal with the car. Get home and out of my sight.’

The cyclist was a young woman. She was according to the student card in her wallet a Ms Jane Morrissey. She was aged nineteen. She was dead.

The guards said that it was always the same no matter how often they saw it, a dead body on the side of the road when some bastard had not stopped, it was terrible. One of them took off his hat and wiped his forehead, the other lit a cigarette. They exchanged glances over the priest, a pleasant soft-spoken man in his fifties. He prayed over the dead girl and he sobbed as if he were a child.

*

He did it all for Laura, he told himself afterwards in the sleepless nights, because he couldn’t drop off and be in a deep dreamless unconscious state for seven and eight hours a night any more. He had changed it to Confession because if it hadn’t been then he would have had to report his sister’s only boy as a hit-and-run driver. Even within the sacrament of Confession he should still have urged the boy to confess and admit.

In real life things weren’t like an old black and white movie with Montgomery Clift playing the tortured priest in an agony of indecision. Today a priest would insist that if a penitent wanted absolution he must face up to the responsibility of his actions, he must make his restitution.

But James Hurley had thought of Laura.

This was a way to save her. It was a way to tell that weak son of hers that he was regarding the matter as one between sinner and Confessor. It hadn’t a leg to stand on in civil or canon law.

He lied to the Garda Sergeant, he said it had been a hysterical call from someone trying to confess, that he had no idea who the driver was. He lied to the parish priest about the caller in the night, he said it was a man looking for alms.

He lied to his sister when she asked him why he couldn’t come down soon and see them again. He said there was a lot on in the parish. The truth was that he couldn’t look them in the eyes. He couldn’t
listen
while they told him some new tale of Gregory’s excellence.

He had driven Gregory’s car to a service station on the other side of Dublin in a place where nobody had known him. He had lied to the garage owner, said that he had driven the parish priest’s car and hit a gate. The garage man loved to hear that a priest could do wrong too, he knocked out the dent and he gave it a thorough going over.