The Dark by John McGahern Page A

strange how you hang too long talking once it goes late, anything rather than go home. And when you think back you can’t know what you’ve been talking all the time about,” the priest said as he drove fast into the empty night, the branches of the trees along the road clean in the moon.
    He sat on the leather seat, the flies flaring constantly into the sweep of the headlamps, worse than home fading from his mind. He was driving with a priest in the night, his father and home miles away. This night he’d sleep in a strange house. He knew nothing.
    The car slowed in the road of sycamores, and turned in open gates, the tyres sounding on the gravel. The church with its bell-rope dangling and the presbytery at the end of the circular drive were clear in the moon, the graveyard between, the headstones showing over the laurels along the drive. In the gravel clearing before the house the car stopped beside where a cactus flowered out of a bugled pedestal. He got out his case and coat and stood in the moon. Between the laurels of the drive a path of white gravel ran unbordered through the graves to the sacristy door.
    “We have the good company of the dead about us,” the priest smiled as if he’d read his mind, “but there’s no need for them to disturb you, they do not walk, not till the Last Day.”
    “It’s a strange feeling though.”
    “It’ll pass, don’t worry.”
    The house was cluttered with old and ponderous furniture, religious pictures in heavy gilt frames and an amazing collectionof grandfather clocks on the walls. Two glasses with sandwiches and a jug of milk stood on a tray in the sitting-room.
    “John has left us something. We might as well eat,” the priest said and filled both glasses.
    “Who is John?”
    “I never told you, he keeps house for me.”
    “And is he old?”
    “Younger than you, just sixteen. He’s from a large family at the other end of the parish.”
    “Isn’t it unusual for a boy?”
    “I suppose. It was his mother mentioned to me that he was fond of housework, which is unusual, I suppose. I was driven crazy at the time with an old harridan of a priest’s housekeeper who was trying at the time to run me and the parish as well as the house. So I suggested to the mother that he should come to me until he is eighteen, I’ll try to use what influence I have to get him placed in a good hotel then. It’s a career with enormous opportunity these days. So everyone is quite happy with the arrangement. I give him some training, so I’d be glad while you’re here if you’re not free with him, treat him respectfully of course, but never forget that both of you are in unequal positions. Anything else would do his training no good.”
    They’d finished eating. The priest’s eyes fixed on the mantelpiece where two delf bulldogs flanked a statue of St. Martin de Porres as he returned to his chair from leaving the tray back on the table.
    “This is what I mean,” he said. “He must have dusted the mantelpiece and look how he’s arranged the things, absolutely no sense of placing.”
    He gazed respectfully as the priest changed the bulldogs to a position that satisfied him but he could see no difference now than before, just bulldogs about a statue of a smallnegro in brown and cream robes on the white marble.
    “Absolutely no sense of taste, a very uncultivated people even after forty years of freedom the mass of Irish are. You just can’t make silk out of sow’s ear at the drop of a hat,” he smiled and took off his Roman collar and lay back in the chair.
    It was shocking to see a priest without his collar for the first time. The neck was chafed red. The priest looked human and frail.
    “I always have to eat just before bed, since I was operated on, they cut two-thirds of my stomach away that time.”
    “When was that, father?”
    “In Birmingham. I hadn’t felt well for ages but put it on the long finger. Then I suddenly collapsed in the sacristy as I was unrobing myself