Eli circumvented the school gates and the teacher on the lookout for reluctant scholars. By using the willows as cover, like countless late arrivers before him, he followed the well-trodden path through the tunnel of greenery. When he reached what he judged to be the general area of the netball courts, he peered out between the branches and found himself looking at a pair of feet in black lace-up shoes and white socks. He looked upwards into Rose’s strange yellow eyes. Pushing his hand through the willow he touched her leg, just above her sock. She looked down and smiled.
‘Kia ora, lovely,’ he said.
‘Hello, Eli. What are you crawling around in there for?’ she asked, trying not to laugh. ‘You’re late,’ she continued, a note of playful severity creeping into her voice.
Eli stood and gleefully linked arms with his alibi. ‘I was looking for you, Rose,’ he said with a wink.
‘How fortuitous,’ Rose replied, mimicking her mother’s inflections with ease. ‘You cut it a bit fine, though. There’s only so long I can wander around the netball courts pretending to be too feeble-minded to find history. Who was it this time?’
‘Susan Richardson,’ Eli said, crossing his eyes and pretending to go weak at the knees.
‘Really. You’ll catch something off her. She’ll do it with anyone.’
‘Oh, don’t I know it,’ Eli said, with a lascivious grin.
‘I found her, Mr Merton,’ he continued, as the lunch-duty teacher and his clipboard hurried towards them across the school grounds.
‘Lost again,’ said Rose, shrugging and looking helpless. ‘Silly me.’
‘Why aren’t you coming to university with me, Eli?’ Rose asked as they slid behind their desks, having missed the first ten minutes of seventh-form history.
‘Oh, you know, I want to have a look around first. Earn some money. Take a year off.’
Bathed in a haze of red light, Rose dropped a square of emulsion-coated paper into a shallow basin of clear chemicals. The sharpness of the developing fluid bit at the sensitive membranes at the base of her nose. By evening she would have a headache and her hands would be starting to peel. Above the trays of developer, fix and wash, the third hand on the clock flicked jerkily around the dial. What would be darkness bloomed first, then the greys, then finally the luminosity of the whites. One minute, two minutes passed. Rose grasped a corner of the slightly slimy photograph between her thumb and forefinger, plucked it out of the developer and dropped it into the tray of photographic fix. She looked at the image in the flattering red light of the darkroom and clicked her tongue in exasperation. The photograph joined a number of other variations of the same print, some darker, some lighter, some barely washes of grey, floating serenely in a river of running water. Rose washed the photograph perfunctorily then pushed open the door of the darkroom. Clutching the dripping print she walked down the hall, through the kitchen and out the door into the backyard. She stood arrested for a moment, blinking and bedazzled in the bright, white, summer sun. She looked at the print.
Han was at the bottom of the garden, on his knees bent over his flowerbeds, his chin resting on his chest and the flat of his palms on his thighs. He was so still that Rose wondered if he was meditating, praying or sleeping. He was doing a combination of all three, but Rose wasn’t to know that. Gavin, a refugee of indeterminate but most likely terrieresque genealogy, was curled up on the grass a few feet from his immobile master. The dog’s ears twitched at flies and he whimpered in his half-sleep.
Gavin had turned up at the back door a few years before and had immediately and rather wisely attached himself to Han. Han had given Gavin a year at the most, but the dog had shown an astounding lack of interest in the big kennel in the sky since he had discovered the joys of the Goshen lifestyle. Gavin’s activities were limited: he slept, he ate and he hobbled optimistically after the half-feral cats that stalked the pub.
The dog was almost completely deaf, so Rose walked unheard – barefoot and barely touching the ground – still holding the print, until she was directly behind Han. The sun was hot on the back of her neck and through the cotton of her shirt. She was bending to kiss his shiny bald spot on the crown of his head when Han conversationally asked, ‘Have you had a productive morning?’
Rose was working on a portfolio for art school, her submission deadline one week away. She laughed. ‘How do you do that?’ she said, shaking her head in amazement that she who could creep up on anyone could never catch him out.
‘Let’s have a look,’ he said. Rose handed him the print.
‘I’m bloody hopeless,’ she said.
Han looked at the photograph. ‘You’re slightly out of focus with the enlarger and it has dust on the lens,’ he said, handing it back to her.
Rose was downcast. ‘It was probably a stupid idea anyway. I won’t get in.’
Han smiled. They had been through this countless times. ‘Have a break and try again later. It’s a good photograph. You will get the picture you want eventually.’
‘Tell me again that patience is a virtue, and a state that I should aspire to,’ she said.
‘Ha,’ barked Han. ‘Help an old man to his feet and I’ll tell you about patience.’
Rose and Han, arm in arm, Gavin bringing up the creaking rear, strolled up the garden towards the pub. The photograph lay on the grass where Rose had forgotten it, until a stray breeze picked it up and carried it away. The loss, like all losses of this type, went unmourned.
It was a Sunday and the Goshen was revelling in the luxury of two whole days of not having to play host. All was quiet when they entered the kitchen, but beneath the crash of the not-too-distant ocean, the cry of the birds working a shoal and screams of playing children, was the unmistakable bubbling and liquid melody of Mrs Spry as she ran her fingers down the long line of bottles behind her bar. The kitchen clock’s hands reached midday and the grandmother clock at the end of the hall confirmed what her colleague in the kitchen had already told them. Compelled by a force beyond reason, perhaps born of habit, of dread or expectation, their lives stood still for a moment in time. Rose stopped talking. Han ceased listening and the click of Gavin’s long black claws on the floor terminated abruptly. Gavin went so far as to cock his head and quiver in expectation. Then, as the matriarchal clock pealed its twelfth, there was an unmistakable chink of bottle and glass and a faint gurgle. As Mrs Spry said, she had standards, admittedly some of them not very high, but she had them nevertheless. Like eating in the street, a woman drinking before midday – communion wine excepted – indicated a very low type indeed in her book. Another chink and gurgle reached their ears. Then another.
Rose giggled. ‘Church must have been a riot today.’
Han shook his head and sighed, ‘If it’s not one thing it’s another.’ He wondered how much Father McNally had coaxed out of her purse this time.
It was Han who reignited Mrs Spry’s Catholicism. He had been enchanted to discover that the district possessed a quaint white-and-red church with arched windows, a bell-hung steeple and a smooth-talking Irish priest in his mid-thirties.
‘You should come with me,’ he urged Mrs Spry. ‘You might enjoy it.’
‘Oh why not,’ she said, having realised that diversions in Goshen were few and far between. ‘We all need a bit of God in our lives now and then.’
What Han couldn’t have predicted was the alacrity with which Mrs Spry embraced her abandoned faith. That in itself didn’t bother him unduly. In fact, he was pleased initially that Mrs Spry had finally found comfort, even if it was in the confessional box.
‘How could you?’ accused Han. ‘He’s a priest, for God’s sake. He’s supposed to be celibate.’
‘He’s a man first,’ Mrs Spry replied, unrepentant.
Father Declan McNally had arrived in Goshen some years before they had, freshly frocked and glitteringly new, from an obscure theological college in County Cork. He had vowed on that initial sighting of his kingdom on earth that he, Declan McNally, would die in Goshen. And it was this desire, the need to know where he would be when he breathed his last and walked into the arms of his maker, rather than the fear of sin, that kept his yearnings in check. For fifteen years he had allowed this thought to keep him from straying from his service to the church who paid his stipend. Then he met Mrs Spry.
Mrs Spry clicked into the kitchen from the bar holding a tumbler, straight up, no ice. ‘How was Jesus?’ Rose asked, walking across the kitchen to the refrigerator. She opened the door and peered in hopefully. Nothing leapt fully formed into her mouth so she closed it again.
‘In fine form as always,’ Mrs Spry told her.
‘I assume the hypocrite McNally will be putting in an appearance this afternoon as usual,’ Han said tartly. What irked him the most wasn’t the hypocrisy but that the priest had succeeded in giving Algebra a sense of peace that he could not. The charts had always told him that an outsider clothed in black was key. Han had always assumed that this black-clad force was himself.
Father McNally always came over on Sunday afternoons to hear Mrs Spry’s confession for a second time and offer all manner of absolution. It mattered little to him that her sins had remained unchanged. They still made his toes curl, even after all these years. Han found it incongruous that by embracing her so-called guilt, Algebra was emancipated from its ceaseless demands on her still-missing soul. The demons of her past, the ones that kept catching up with her, were brought out for a brief airing and an outing on a Sunday before being packed away in the back of her mind for another week.
Han left the kitchen abruptly with Gavin a heartbeat and a half behind him. Rose scratched her knee idly and extracted an apple from the bowl on the table. ‘Declan coming over for lunch?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Mrs Spry, ‘one o’clock as per usual.’ She looked hopefully in the direction of the oven. No plump chicken or juicy joint roasted in its depths; no vegetables sat in pots waiting to be boiled.
‘I don’t think Han’s quite up to cooking for your boyfriend today,’ Rose observed.
‘So it would seem,’ said Mrs Spry absent-mindedly. The gin was beginning to kick in and blur the edges. ‘We’ll have sandwiches then, jam sandwiches for Sunday lunch. How perfect.’
Rose continued to eat her apple, offering no opinion.
‘You don’t really mind about Declan, do you, Rose?’ asked Mrs Spry.
‘Only for Han. I don’t care, but he does,’ replied Rose. ‘I don’t understand you two. I don’t think I ever will. It’s just stupid.’
Mrs Spry sighed. ‘It’s complicated …’ she began.
‘It always is,’ Rose said, getting up and throwing her apple core in the bin.
By the end of the summer, Rose would be gone.
I spent many hours sitting with Mrs Spry, in the garden, in her room, but mostly in the familiarity of the kitchen in those last months: collecting her words.
‘I only want to take the things I cherish,’ she said, ‘only Goshen, dear Goshen.’ And that’s why she gave me Jerusalem, and the time before then.
What I remember about Mrs Spry – more than the story of Jerusalem, which is so remote that it feels like a fiction – I remember her at Goshen and I remember her laughing. Always she was laughing. I also remember Declan McNally administering the last rites, before collapsing to his knees and giving in to grief. His harsh, racking sobs filled up the room. He died, exactly as he had dreamed, in his own bed under the eaves of the presbytery at Goshen, over a decade later.