The Miracle Man (19 page)

Mr Rowan continued,

“One must also understand that what was a substantial monthly income twenty-five years ago would nowadays be regarded as – well – rather a paltry sum, to be honest. Your expenses have – very understandably – risen, whilst income has tended to – decline.”

Cissy pushed away her soup, which she had hardly touched, and leant forward, as though to hear Mr Rowan the better. “The result of all of this, dear ladies, is that your assets have been reduced to the point where – to be brutally frank, as I am honour bound to be – there aren’t any. Except for about five thousand shares in Commonwealth and Orient and about the same in Consolidated Uranium, for which my son has, very generously I have to say, instructed me to offer you, on his behalf, fifty pence each. He would like you to know that he is prepared to take the loss in order to assist you dear ladies in this lean period – and of course in the hope that some day the price might rise a little. A forlorn hope, I told him, but he absolutely insisted.” Mr Rowan smiled indulgently at the thought of his dear son, who had learned so very well from his father. “The impetuousness of youth, mh? He has his mother’s charitableness. `Johnson,’ I said to him, ‘this is business.’ ‘No Father,’ he told me, ‘these are the Misses Garrison.’ Even for a hard-nosed old realist like myself, it really was quite a touching
moment. I would have to say that it is an excellent offer, and I would urge you to take it. Now,” he clapped his hands together as though all had been amicably resolved, “where has that white fish of ours got to, I wonder?” He gave what sounded like a little chuckle but was in effect the death rattle of the Garrison assets. “I doubt this is not an eating place I would care to recommend.”

A glazed expression on her face, Margaret Garrison sat looking at Mr Rowan, whom she had hitherto admired as the financial wizard who had smoothed their path through life with a modest income and many reassurances.

“Are you saying, Mr Rowan – “, her normally strong voice was now light and quavering, “ – that we have – nothing left at all, apart from these shares? Nothing – at all?”

Mr Rowan bestowed a beneficent smile on his client, who was soon to be an ex-client.

“One thing that has always kept me on my toes over the course of our long relationship, Miss Margaret, is my knowledge of your perspicacity, your ability to grasp in an instant the essential details of a complex situation and draw a logical conclusion, and over all those years I have from time to time regretted a little that you did not wish to be taken more fully into my confidence in these matters. I feel sure you could have made an invaluable contribution. You are, as always, perfectly correct in your financial assessment. The ten thousand shares to which I referred represent you and Miss Cissy’s total worth. Yes, indeed.”

“You mean – no more property?”

He shook his head. “No more property.”

“And – the land – ?”

“All gone, I’m afraid, sacrificed to maintain what one can only call a comfortable lifestyle.” This was perfectly true, except that he did not reveal that the comfortable lifestyle was his own. “But please,” he continued, the soul of reasonableness,
“why not look on the bright side? There are still the shares,” he leant forward and said in a conspiratorial manner, “and I just might be able to persuade Johnson to part with a little more for them, perhaps sixty pence each.” He waved a hand. “He can afford it.”

Cissy aimlessly moved a knife on the table-cloth then said,

“I assume you have some kind of – record – of all these transactions, Mr Rowan?”

Mr Rowan’s eyes were suddenly narrowed as he looked at Miss Cissy with a new wariness, but he smiled and said, “My dear Miss Cissy, one couldn’t possibly keep records of everything over such a lengthy period of time. The paperwork would be staggering – and very expensive to maintain. But – why would you want such a thing, for goodness sake?” He laughed lightly.

Miss Cissy had begun to move her knife again.

“So that we could see if you had been cheating us or not.”

Taken aback, Margaret glared at her sister and then almost shouted,

“Cissy! How dare you!”

Mr Rowan’s smile transmogrified into a grimace.

“Well now, I think perhaps Miss Cissy is a little overwrought. Perhaps understandable in the circumstances.”

“Thank you, Mr Rowan, but absolutely nothing can excuse such behaviour. Cissy, you will please apologise at once to Mr Rowan.”

“I will, Margaret, if he can show us that what I said isn’t true.” Her knife came to rest pointing straight at Mr Rowan and she looked directly at him with her weak green eyes, which hitherto had been seen as reflecting her general dullness but suddenly appeared merely to be cloaking a sharp intellect. “It can’t all have gone, Mr Rowan. Not the whole of our father’s estate.”

It was the solicitor’s turn to have a little quavering sound in his voice.

“Miss Margaret, I am a patient man and well used to dealing with – difficult clients. But your sister has gone too far and has questioned not only my honesty but also my professional integrity. I simply cannot accept that.”

“You could sue me for slander,” Cissy said mildly, “except that if you won – I wouldn’t have any money to pay you.”

Mr Rowan stood up quickly from the table and a spoon clattered to the floor. With a sweeping gesture he wiped his mouth with his napkin and threw it onto the table.

“That’s it, Miss Margaret. I’m sorry, but I’m not prepared to hear any more of this, especially after all the work I have done on your behalf over so many years. I have explained to you how the present unfortunate situation came about and yet – either deliberately or through lack of wit – your sister does not seem to understand.” He buttoned his silk and mohair jacket and stood erect. “I would be pleased if you would, as soon as possible, let me know about the sale of the shares I have mentioned. Despite what has happened, I will endeavour to persuade my son to keep his excellent offer open. Then, our business relationship will be at an end. Rather a tawdry end, I fear, but an end nonetheless. Farewell, dear lady.” He shook the outstretched hand of a tearful Miss Margaret. “I’m sorry, Miss Cissy, but in the circumstances, I do not feel that I can extend the same courtesy to you. Goodbye.”

And with this he gave a little bow and walked briskly out of the dining-room. Unperturbed, Miss Cissy carefully repositioned her knife, while Miss Margaret, shocked beyond previous experience, sat staring into space, tears brimming in her eyes.

Later in the day, when Father Burke was driving to the Mass Rock field to see the new stream for himself, he saw Peggy May walking along the road in the same direction. He pulled up his car, which he had not yet quite decided to sell in favour of a bicycle, reached across and opened the door.

“Can I offer you a lift?”

Peggy May looked at him, executed a partial genuflection by the roadside, and climbed into the passenger seat.

“Thank ye, Father. I’m very grateful. The elastic in these new knickers is like cheese wire. It near has the backside cut off me. I tell ye, I’d be better with them off.”

A look of mild panic swept across the young priest’s face.

“I – eh – I’m sure they’ll be all right when you – in a few days.” Father Burke squirmed in his seat and wished he had left the wretched girl to walk wherever she was going.

“Oh, Father, I wouldn’t wear them for that long! They’d be walking on their own, so they would. My Mammy says that cleanliness is next to Godliness – especially round the nether regions.”

Father Burke rolled his eyes to heaven, and then said quickly,

“I’ve been interviewed by a journalist, you know. From the Northern Reporter. About what’s been happening up at our Mass Rock here.” The priest glanced over to see how impressed Peggy May was by this. “It was in this morning’s paper. Did you see it?”

“We don’t get a paper in our house, Father. My Da says all they’re good for’s lighting the fire or wiping your arse.”

Father Burke sank a little lower in his seat.

“That’s where I’m going now, Father. The Mass Rock. D’you think we’ll see the Virgin?”

“Well – it is a possibility, but I doubt it.”

“Why not, Father? I prayed for her to come so I could ask her to get Saint Anthony to help our Margaret.”

Father Burke sighed.

“Why does your Margaret need Saint Anthony’s help?” He braced himself for the answer, which he felt would not be capable of prediction by a score of logicians, or, in this woman’s case, illogicians.

“Because I heard our Margaret saying she was pregnant and she didn’t know who the father was and I’m going to ask Saint Anthony to find him.”

Father Burke’s car swerved a little on the road and around the steering wheel his knuckles showed white.

“Well, I still don’t think you can count on seeing the Virgin Mary at the Mass Rock.”

And Peggy May glanced over at the young parish priest as if she had just decided to reconsider her belief in the infallibility of the Church.

From the gate into the Mass Rock field they saw small groups of women kneeling in a semicircle round the rock and praying, some aloud with the rosary beads inching through their fingers, while others with hands clasped before them mumbled into their chests. Now and then a woman would break away from a group and go to the stream to fill a plastic container or an empty whiskey bottle. One old woman walked away clutching two vacuum flasks, happy in the thought that her rheumatism would now be a thing of the past. The overcast sky and the drizzle of rain that fell softly upon them gave Father Burke the impression that the scene could have been one from long ago, dark, distant days when the Mass Rock had been regularly used for worship and in sympathy with the oppressed peasants the sun had rarely shone on the benighted land. He stood at the gate, enthralled.

“Now isn’t this what we see before us the very essence of Catholic Ireland?” he said, addressing no-one in particular and certainly not Peggy May, who stood beside him, similarly overwhelmed by the spectacle, although perhaps for different reasons. “The Faith kept throughout the ages – the dark ages – handed down from one generation to another under the guidance of the servants of God. It was like a living flame that had sometimes to be hidden in a deep cave and at other times
could be revealed for all the world to see, carried aloft – “ his hands rose to the level of his face, “ – to the huzzas of the faithful, with incense and bells and benedictions. And it can be that way again. Here in this glen there can be a statement of God’s love for man, a place of pilgrimage to which people will come – like these women – the tired, the sick, the hungry, even those of little faith who seek a new path in their lives, a way back to God’s love.”

Peggy May, while barely understanding the words the priest had spoken, was looking up at him in awe, occasioned by his staring eyes, his dramatic posture and his missionary tone.

“We could build a shrine – over there!”

He could see it before him, built around the rock to protect the holy place, perhaps to a height corresponding to halfway up the trees above it. No, higher than that – and wider. How could he put a limit on the glorification of God? But should they not start out with grander plans, for a church, perhaps, or even – he gave a little shiver of excitement at the thought – a basilica?

“A basilica,” he almost whispered.

But Peggy May’s enthusiasm had quickly waned. She had a thumb hitched in a leg of her knickers and was attempting to ease the cutting action of the elastic.

Of course, the field in front of the Mass Rock would need to be cleared and paved to accommodate the multitudes and a great stone pulpit built from which he, Father Ignatius Loyola Burke, would preach to them. And roads. There would need to be roads built, wide and straight, that would carry the faithful to this holy place which in time would surely come to rival Croagh Patrick and even Armagh itself as the true repository of the Faith of the nation.

“Ah,” he said, “what a wonderful prospect and vouchsafed to me to make a reality.” He basked in the glory of his own creation.

“Father, d’you think would Mr McBride take these knickers back after I’ve worn them? He wouldn’t take a cream bun back from Mrs McAuley because he said there was a fingerprint on it.”

Behind them, a car went through a puddle at speed. Father Burke jumped back, but it was too late. The car threw out a great wave of muddy water that missed Peggy May completely and caught the priest around the back of his legs.

“Bastard!” he said, quite forgetting Peggy May’s presence.

“That’s what Mrs McAuley said too, Father.”

All of the women stopped praying and collecting water when they saw Father Burke approaching and they began to gather round him, one or two casting puzzled glances at his wet feet and trousers. Peggy May was ignored. Many of them began to speak at once, pointing towards the stream or holding up their water containers.

“Father,” said one woman, “d’you think she’ll come again? Will we see her, Father? God Almighty I’d drop dead if she came when I was here, so I would.”

“Somebody was supposed to have seen something up in the trees last night,” said another.

“Have you come to bless it, Father?”

“Now now, ladies, please, don’t get carried away. There’s been nothing proven yet, although – ”

“But Father, what about the vision – and the stream? There must be something.”

“Would the water sort cats, Father?” The old woman had managed to wriggle her way to the front, carrying a large ginger tomcat. Father Burke smiled at her, although he had a worried look on his face and someone else told the cat woman that she was taking some of the water home to give to a goat that was ailing. With the women crowding round him, Father Burke made his way to the Mass Rock and saw the little stream that flowed from the ground beneath it.

“Has there ever been a stream here before?” he asked.

“Not within living memory, Father.”

“That’s very interesting indeed. Of course, it may only be a coincidence, but if it is, it’s rather a large one, to my way of thinking.” Stepping back, he looked up at the top of the rock. It was just the kind of place one could imagine the Virgin Mary appearing. The fine rain drifted like mist in front of the trees and across the face of the rock to land as tiny silver beads on his black jacket. He seemed to sparkle with white light.