Chapter 8
It is nightfall in Calcutta, on the third evening of Liam’s interrogation. Two candelabra are being placed by servants at either end of the table. Liam gazes at them and then at the faces of the committee members, which, above their dark robes, are rendered as unsteady, coruscating masks.
He rubs a hand over his face: his eyes ache inside the dry hollows of their sockets.
Surely this can’t go on much longer—they can’t keep him here for ever, can they?
One of the men is talking at length, his face furious, his chin trembling in outrage.
Is it Portuguese the man is speaking or perhaps Latin?
Liam cannot tell—the man’s words reach him like the sound of birds—or maybe it is that he no longer cares.
The man is asking him about his life just before he went into the priesthood.
“My mother had just passed away.” Liam cuts across the man’s words and the utterance hurts his parched mouth. “A matter of weeks before I left.”
“And your father?”
Liam stares at the man, mute, wrong-footed.
My father, he wants to say, why would you ask about my father?
The committee wait for his answer, their pens poised above their papers.
On the candelabra, Liam counts six candles in each, which means a total of twelve.
The same number as the apostles. This coincidence strikes Liam as hugely significant, or perhaps it is of no consequence at all, perhaps—
“Your father,” another man raps out, making Liam flinch, “was he encouraging about you taking orders?”
Liam goes to speak, then realises that his mouth has somehow twisted into a soundless line: he is unable to utter the word “father” or even “Tomás,” and he does not know why this is. Sweat breaks out on his brow, his upper lip.
“He—I—I…my—my—” he hears himself stammer “—my fa— Well…he…”
Liam lets the breath leave his body, closes his eyes to the glare of the twelve candles, the four faces peering at him through the chamber’s heavy miasma. His pulse is suddenly clicking painfully in his throat; his hands are slick with cold moisture.
He tries to calm himself, to think his way back to those weeks between his mother’s death and his leaving for the novitiate: if he forms a reply to this question, maybe then they will let him go.
The interrogator is asking about the time before he entered the House of First Formation, so he duly tries to picture their broken household, his mother’s empty chair, how he longed to be gone—it couldn’t come fast enough.
An extraordinary thing, however: his thoughts will keep returning, insistently, to the well, and the day he first walked into the copse.
It is perverse, it is unfathomable. What has this to do with his taking orders?
He buries his face in his hands, seeking a response to the question, trying to picture his mother, as she was, laid out on the table, the neighbours gathering in the room for her wake.
But his mind, like a troublesome and headstrong steed, will not heed the command: it offers him instead the image of a person standing on a distant hillock, blurred by fog.
He presses the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, finding that he is on the verge of tears but wanting to keep them at bay, for he refuses to give this committee the satisfaction of breaking down in front of them.
He considers telling them about the time on the hillside, the day their lives were set off-course, or maybe even on-course, because who is to say that the six of them were not destined to end up exactly where they did?
Perhaps they might then understand. He would like, instead of answering their futile questions, to describe for them his abortive apprenticeship, and the process of mapping, the complex labour and responsibility of it, its peculiar mix of science and storytelling, mathematics and artistry.
He would like to tell them about the exorcism, his father’s melancholy, the terror and upheaval of it all.
My father, he would say, by way of a beginning, was ever a man of few words.
Even knowing that it is hardly likely to help his case, Liam feels the urge to relate the tale to them from its strange start.
It might, he thinks, go some way to explain what has happened here, in India.
He looks out instead at the consoling shape of the dark banyan tree, its massive width of trunk, the peculiar crutch-like aerial roots.
His vision seems beset with a bewildering palimpsest: parakeet feathers, the tree, lightning-bolt flashes of Calcutta dusk between its branches, his sisters and Eugene standing at their mother’s grave with the priest, grey veils of drizzle, shallow turquoise inlets, his father bending over his loy with a sharpening stone.
He realises three things; they apprehend him as triple truths.
That he will, as soon as he is able, return to where he came from, to the peninsula and his family.
That he will never speak of Tomás in this room, to these furious men.
That his father is somehow antithetical to these men, to the Church.
Like magnets held together, his father and the Church will always repel each other.
It comes to him that he is about to speak, so he stands up.
“It was the parish priest’s fault,” Liam hears himself announce, and the members of the committee frown. “Father Joseph was his name. It was him put me up to it. If you’re looking for someone to blame, it should be him. This is his fault.”
Consternation among the committee. Two of the men raise their voices to pepper Liam with furious refutations; one glares at him balefully, pen at the ready; the other his hands over his ears, as if to shield them from Liam’s words.
Liam lowers himself back to a seated position.
It all seems so clear to him suddenly, the petulant priest and the choice he laid out for Liam: he could have his father, who loved him, or he could have the Church, which did not.
As he grips the edge of the hard wooden bench in the sweltering dim room, Liam cannot for the life of him fathom why he chose the latter.
“Tell us,” the man with the pen urges, once more, “about the weeks leading up to your departure for the priesthood.”
At the table, as they eat their porridge, Liam shifts in his seat and clears his throat, and Rose looks at him expectantly, her heart brimming with hope.
With every passing moment of every day she is waiting for him to say that he is putting off his entry into the priesthood, at least until the hay is in or the turf footed or until the winter.
He’s going to say it, she is certain, because he wouldn’t be leaving them now, surely, not just after their mother’s passing.
He is about to say that he intends to write to the novitiate and tell them he won’t be coming this year but perhaps the next. Rose smiles in readiness.
The five of them are eating in silence, Enda absently drumming out a rhythm on the table with her fingers, Eugene leaning up against her, Tomás sitting a little apart from them all, his scarf already wound around his neck.
Rose sits straighter, certain that Liam is about to speak, to tell them he is going to delay his departure; she is ready to spring up and embrace him, the minute he has the words out.
Liam does not meet her eye. He shuffles his feet beneath the table, opens his mouth and says it is twelve days until he will leave.
Enda pauses in her drumming, glancing first at Tomás, then Eugene. Rose gets unsteadily to her feet, leaving the dishes on the table. She doesn’t know what to do; she cannot look at her brother. Blindly, she snatches up the creel of laundry and heads out the door, banging it shut behind her.
Outside, the day is fair and the rain has held off, despite the grey-bellied clouds that have slumped, exhausted, to the hilltops.
Rose marches her burden to the washing stone, a large flat rock at a bend in the stream, and she wades in, trampling and soaping the clothes with a tearful, venomous exertion.
In truth, she could have left the laundry but the weather may turn—they may not get a dry day again for a while.
It has nothing to do, she tells herself, with her sudden urge to get outside, to leave the confines of the cottage, to get away from Liam and his pronouncements, his certainties, his self-satisfied packing and preparing, his ostentatious scripture-reading at all hours.
From where she is, at the washing stone, she can look up at the house.
She sees Eugene moving from the gable end to the donkey’s enclosure, and back again.
He seems to be conducting some kind of internal debate, counting off something on his fingers, and she wonders with a pang if it is Liam’s remaining days.
Bran has stretched himself out in Eugene’s path so that the boy must step over the dog as he moves, and Rose thinks that after this, when she’s finished the laundry, she’ll take them down to the shore for a while: Eugene loves to run in circles with Bran on the strand.
It will distract him from what Liam said at breakfast. She sees Enda come crashing out of the half-door, their father calling after her to mind the cow, to take it up to grazing; she sees Enda ignore this, hastily knot her shawl and, planting a quick kiss on Eugene’s hair, hurry away.