she was about to get up.
‘Are you sure you won’t have tea, Father?’
‘No one is talking about force, Miss Sale,’ said Father Costelloe. ‘It’s just that the local people don’t like it.’
‘Don’t like what, Father? Our nephew seems to be very well regarded by everyone.’
‘They don’t like seeing a Catholic going into the Protestant church when everyone knows it is forbidden. And they don’t like that he doesn’t go to Mass every Sunday when it’s the rule that he must.’
The atmosphere in the room suddenly changed with Eleanor’s desire to be hospitable and friendly severely challenged.
‘As I mentioned, Father,’ said Eleanor, ‘we can’t oblige our nephew to do anything …’
Father Costelloe interrupted her. He had not yet finished.
‘People could become “uncooperative” like,’ he said, ‘and none of us would want an upset like that in the neighbourhood. Your Reverend West is a sound man. He and I often have a chat.’
As Martha had not been taking part in the conversation, she had been able to listen more intently to what Father Costelloe had been saying and when she heard the words ‘uncooperative, like’ – she detested the vulgar expression – she rested her needle in the pincushion on the arm of her chair. She readily determined that, although the priest had stated that he was not talking about ‘force’, that was precisely what he was talking about; and when he spoke of the local people being possibly ‘uncooperative’, she was confident that she understood what he meant by that too. She was reminded of reading a year or two previously of events down south where a Catholic mother, with a Protestant husband, had sent their children to the Protestant school. The local priest denounced the couple from the pulpit and that led to some Protestants becoming virtual outcasts; and, hard though it was to imagine – the Sales had been in Coolowen for so very long – she thought what such a situation could mean to her and Eleanor. She became suddenly frightened.
‘Uncooperative?’ she heard Eleanor say. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Father.’
‘Father Costelloe is just speaking on behalf of Father Flynn, Eleanor,’ said Martha.
She turned towards their visitor.
‘We’ll have a word with Fergal,’ she said, ‘won’t that do, Father?’
‘I’m speaking on behalf of the bishop himself, Miss Martha, and the rule of the bishop is Mass every Sunday.’
He was flushed but he was not agitated and, as he stood up, the anger in his attitude was all the more obvious. But it was an anger which went beyond any of Fergal’s transgressions. Father Costelloe was not intimidated at finding himself in the sitting room at Coolowen and he was not intimidated by the graciousness of the Misses Sale. But he was angered by them and angered, according to his view, by everything they stood for; and it was an anger which went beyond religious differences to probe the wider realm of Ireland’s history as it stretched back over the centuries.
‘It’s been very nice of you to call, Father,’ said Eleanor.
She stood up and pushed the bell by the fireplace.
‘They say there will be more rain next week. It’s been such a wet month: no growth at all. Everything is behind in the garden.’
Their maid, Doris, came to the door.
‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ said Father Costelloe. ‘Good day to you now, ladies.’
He hardly waited to shake their hands before following Doris out of the room.
After he had gone, neither Martha nor Eleanor spoke. Martha returned to her stitching and Eleanor took up The Leader. The sisters wanted to be silent and it was several days before either of them referred to the conversation that had taken place.
‘It could develop into a shocking business,’ said Martha. ‘It would mean none of the shops would supply us, not even with the Emergency rations to which we are entitled. And if it went on, others in the parish … Dr Knox … the Holts … they would suffer too.’
‘And all because of dear Fergal,’ said Eleanor.
The aunts did not say anything immediately to Fergal but when it came to Sunday, they suggested that he should go to Mass.
‘It’ll stand you in good stead to be seen by the local people,’ they told him. ‘It’s a country thing. Playing one’s part in the community, and all that.’
Fergal did not demur and, after he dropped Martha and Eleanor off at church, he drove on up to the chapel. With one excuse or another, the sisters saw to it that the same happened on subsequent Sundays as well, so that after a while it became a habit.
A habit is all it was as far as Fergal and his aunts were concerned but it was habit enough to satisfy Father Costelloe.
7
Julia
FERGAL HAD BEEN in Ireland almost four years when Julia went away to school. He had been twenty-one that summer and his aunts had given him a party at Coolowen. The Second World War had ended the previous year, rationing was still in place and there were great shortages of everything, but that did not deter the sisters in wanting to celebrate for ‘their dear Fergal’. It was at the party that Julia told him that she was leaving him.
‘I’m going away,’ she said, as though she were an heiress jilting her betrothed.
‘Really,’ said Fergal who did not at all believe her.
‘Yes,’ said Julia, ‘to boarding school. In Dublin.’
As with everything which concerned his elder daughter, her father had formed the view that, when it came to her education, only the best would do and, as a result, he had enrolled Julia in the smartest – and the most expensive – Protestant secondary school in Ireland: Adelaide College in Dublin.
‘Pappy is sending me to Adelady to learn to be a lady,’ she told Fergal. ‘That’s what the school does. It’s not for exams and books.’
Fergal was somewhat discouraged by this piece of information as he thought that Julia, although only thirteen, was already quite lady enough. That did not, however, serve to diminish his interest in her and, during the years she was at school, he remained fascinated. In those years Julia passed briskly through adolescence and marched briskly towards becoming an alluring young woman. Six years later, when she went up to university at Trinity College, she cut a striking and sophisticated figure. Long russet hair, very tall and a figure that was sensuous rather than slim she dressed more formally than other undergraduates – cashmere twinsets, tailored costumes and, always, her mother’s pearls. Sharing with a pair of Roedean girls a spacious top-floor flat in a Fitzwilliam Square house where doctors’ consulting rooms took up the lower floors, she settled on reading ‘Mod Lang’. Not that it was her intention to ‘read’ very much: ‘having a good time’, as she explained to Lydia, was more on her mind.
‘College is not about getting a degree,’ she said. ‘Everyone gets a degree. Going to Trinity is more like “coming out” used to be. You are there to meet people and be seen.’
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