Laura never thought like that. She was happy, she walked her two big collie dogs, read her books in the evening by her small fire, and went to work by day for the local solicitors. She said laughingly that she hadn’t managed to close them down like she had done to every other business she worked for but she had managed to change them utterly.
Like changing the confirmed bachelor status of young Mr Black. The Mr Black who had once been the most eligible man in the county. At the age of forty he looked at Laura Hurley aged thirty-four and a lot of his iron-hard resolve about staying single, uninvolved and free began to chip away.
Then the letter arrived: ‘Dearest Jimbo, you’ll never believe it but Alan Black and I are going to get married. We would very much like it if you could perform the ceremony for us. Since we’re not in the first flush of youth to put it mildly we won’t make an exhibition of ourselves here with everyone coming to stare. We would like to come to Dublin and be married in your parish if that’s possible. Dearest Jimbo, I never knew I could feel so happy. And so safe and as if things were meant to turn out like this. I don’t deserve it, I really don’t.’
Father Hurley always remembered that letter from his sister, he could see it, the words almost tumbling over each other on the small cream writing paper. He remembered the way his eyes had watered with a feeling of pleasure that things really did seem to have some point if this kind woman had found someone generous and good to share her life with her. He couldn’t remember Alan Black except that he had been very handsome and rather dashing-looking in the past.
Father James Hurley felt that at twenty-nine he was a man of the world. And in a strange way he felt protective of his older sister as he joined her hand with Alan Black’s at the wedding ceremony. He hoped this man with the dark eyes and dark hair just greying at the temples would be good to Laura and understand her generosity and how she had never sought anything for herself.
Several times he found himself looking at them and with a hope that was more than a wish, it was a silent prayer, he willed his sister to have a good relationship with this tall handsome man. Laura’s face was open and honest, but even on this her wedding day nobody could call her beautiful, her hair was pulled back and tied with a large cream-coloured ribbon which matched the colour of her suit. The ribbon was large enough to be considered a hat or head covering for church. She had a dusting of face powder and a smile that warmed the small congregation to the heart. But she was not a beautiful woman. Young Father Hurley hoped that the attentions of the handsome solicitor would not wander.
Years later he marvelled at his own callow approach and wondered how he could ever have thought himself any use in advising men and women in their lives on their road to God. In a changing world there never was and never had been anything more strong and constant than the love Alan Black had shown to his bride. From the day that they had come to see him, back suntanned and laughing from their honeymoon in Spain, he should have realized that his own judgements based on appearances and vanity were superficial. Why should Alan Black, a bright intelligent man, not be able to see the great worth, goodness and love in Laura Hurley? After all James Hurley had always seen it himself, why should he think it would pass Mr Black the solicitor by?
And as the years went on he used to go to stay with them. They had done up the little gate lodge and built on extra rooms. There was a new study out at one side of the house filled with books from ceiling to floor, they lit a fire there in the evenings and often the three of them sat in big chairs reading. It was the most peaceful happy place he had ever been.
Sometimes Laura would look up from the chair where she lay curled up and smile at him.
‘Isn’t this the life, Jimbo?’ she’d say.
Other days when he visited she might walk with him through the fields and over the stiles and hedges and ditches they had once owned.
‘Did we ever think it would turn out so well, Jimbo?’ she said often, ruffling the hair of her young brother who would never be the great Father Hurley to her.
And then they told him they were building a similar long low room at the other side of the house. It was going to be a nursery playroom. They would never call it the nursery, they said, they would call it the child’s room whatever his or her name was. Nursery was only a baby name. The name was Gregory, Father James held the baby in his arm for the Baptism. A beautiful child with the long dark eyelashes of his father. Gregory Black.
He was their only child; Laura said they would like to have had a brother or sister for him but it was not to be. They made sure he had plenty of other children to play with. He turned out to be the dream child that every doting uncle hopes for.
He would run from the window seat of his own big low room when he saw the car approaching.
‘It’s Uncle Jim,’ he would shout and the old collie dogs would bark and leap and Laura would rush from the kitchen.
When Alan got back from work the smile was broad and the delight obvious. They loved to see him come for a couple of days mid week. They loved the way he got on so well with their son.
Gregory wanted to be a priest of course, when he was around ten. It was a far better life than working in his father’s office, he told them all seriously. As a priest you had to do nothing at all, and people paid you money for saying Masses that you’d be saying anyway, and you could get up on a pulpit and tell them all what to do or else they’d go to hell. Sensing a delighted if half-shocked audience, Gregory went on eagerly. It was the best job in the world. And you could refuse to forgive anyone in Confession if you didn’t like them and then they’d go to hell, it would be great.
They came to Dublin to see him too and James Hurley never tired of talking about this warm bright boy. Gregory wanted to know everything, to meet everyone. He could charm crabbed old parish priests and difficult women parishioners who were always quick to fancy slights.
‘I think you would be good as a priest actually,’ his uncle said to him laughingly one day when Gregory was fifteen. ‘An awful lot of it is public relations and getting along with people, you’re very good at that.’
‘It makes sense,’ Gregory said.
Father Hurley looked at him sharply. Yes of course it made sense to present an amiable face towards people rather than a pompous one, of course it was the wise thing to do to take the path that would not bring the wrath of authority around your ears. But fancy knowing that at fifteen. They were growing up a lot faster these days.
When Gregory got his place in UCD he was studying Law, that made sense too, he said. He had to study something and Law was as good a training as anything else, meanwhile it kept his father, grandfather and uncle happy to think another Black was going to come into the business.
‘And is that what you are going to do?’ Father Hurley was surprised. Gregory seemed to him to be too bright, too lively to settle in the small town. There wouldn’t be enough to hold his sharp eyes that moved restlessly from face to face, from scene to scene.
‘I haven’t really thought it out, Uncle Jim. It’s what my mother and father would like certainly, and since I don’t know yet it makes sense to let them assume that it’s what I’ll do.’
Again there was a slight chill in the words. The boy had not said he was lying to his family, he had said that since nothing in this world was definite why cross your bridges before you came to them? Father James Hurley told himself that once or twice when he was saying his Evening Office and when the memory of Gregory’s words troubled him. He began to think that he was becoming a foolish fusspot. It was ridiculous to read danger into the practical plans of a modern young man.
Gregory graduated well and was photographed on his own and with his father, mother and uncle.
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 i
t 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?’
&nbs
p; ‘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 …’