Paddy said, Right, and made no further reply to his daughter’s story. He left Moll sobbing and Kit shushing in the kitchen and made for the shed. The motor-car started easily enough, with only the bare amount of choking of the carburettor and pumping of the throttle, and he eased it out into the yard, and he looked at Kit and Moll at the half-door as he headed for the gate, chickens flapping panicked before him. He stopped and rolled his window down and said, Will I clear him, so? And Moll nodded and her face was white and streaked with tears, and Kit also nodded and she walked forward from the threshold to the window of the car and she put an envelope in Paddy’s hand. Give him that, she said, if he lets on not to have the price of his journey home. And Paddy looked up into his wife’s face and saw there, for the first time since the early days of Moll’s disappearance, an expression of perfect bewilderment, and terrible fear, and terrible tiredness, a hunted look: she was an old woman.
The lane was dry and he had no trouble rolling to the middle gate and through it and down to the road, freewheeling on the down slope as was his habit in order to save fuel, and once he made the cross he turned right for the Esker Line and the town of Nenagh where a black man from England waited for him in Grenham’s guesthouse and he wondered at how life could be a certain way one minute and a different way altogether the next with no effort at all from the person whose life it was. For a man to do his duty now was not enough, it seemed. To live a Christian life, observing all the obligations that entailed, doing his work and minding his wife and daughter and saying his prayers and going to Mass and the odd hurling match. Why had these chaotic things been visited on a man so inclined to peacefulness and contentment? A daughter turned unaccountably to flight and madness and this visitation from a dark stranger. It was like something out of a book, one of those affronting ones that were banned for being a danger to the morals and the mortal souls of decent people. He’d had enough of it now and he’d have no more. The black was going to be cleared and Moll was going to explain herself and her missing years and her impertinent talk of penances and mansions and she was going to apologize to Ellen Jackman and she was going to conduct herself properly in future and she was going to kneel for the rosary every night and go to Mass every Sunday and help her mother in the house and yard, and none of this was going to be spoken of again. A line was going to be drawn under it once this man was told that whatever notions he had about being engaged to a good Christian girl from a house of faithful people he could relinquish immediately, and he could turn around now and take himself back to whatever corner of the world he came from.
And Kit was left with the crying child. Like a new mother, she wasn’t sure of herself. She felt a smoulder of rage being bellowed to flame inside her at this new development but she shut her eyes and she joined her hands tight together in the wide pocket of her apron and she took a deep breath and held it, and after a few long moments the flame died for want of oxygen and she was able to be reasonable, or to speak with some passing semblance of reasonableness at least. The child was hegging and sobbing still and her hair hung over her face and she was gripping the leading edge of the hearth seat at either side of herself, as though to steady herself, to keep herself upright, so tight that her knuckles were drained white of blood. Kit moved towards her, thinking all the while of the most blessed of mothers, and how the trouble would only have started for her once her Child came back from the dead. Because those Pharisees would have come calling, as sure as God. The scriptures made no mention of it but she must have lived on, back in Nazareth. They’d never have let her off with it. They’d have come calling for certain, once it got out that her Son had escaped the tomb, and they’d have made her pay.
Tell me the truth now, while your father isn’t here. While the poor man is inside in Nenagh, facing down the heathen. Tell me the truth now, Moll, and shame the devil. But Moll was silent still, except for a whimper and a snuffle here and there, and Kit could feel her good temper beginning to gallop away wild again, and she had to keep a tight rein on it, she knew, she had to keep it at an easy canter, because if she lost control of it all hell would break loose. This was too much, too much by far for any person to have to contend with. And Kit felt a distant pang of longing for the life of eventless wondering and prayer and untroubled heartbreak that she and Paddy had lived for the years just gone, and she admonished herself severely for it, for the unforgivable ingratitude it would constitute to regret any single aspect of her daughter’s return; she was obliged, she knew, to give thanks even for the sight and sound of Moll cursing her husband’s employer and their landlady, the wife and the plenipotentiary agent of the owner of the ground on which their home stood, and implying all sorts of filthy things; and that was the devil’s fault, she knew, because the devil had a great trick, ancient and well-tried, of seizing the bodies and the tongues of young women, and leading them into badness, sometimes only for moments, but a moment was often enough for a soul to be cast from the path of righteousness and set on the road to perdition.
Kit had an idea that some truth was close to being told, something revealed about her daughter that might lead eventually through its revelation to redemption, though redemption for what misdoings Kit could not tell. She had an idea or two about the true nature of her daughter and her time in the darkness, born of instinct and intuition and the inarticulable knowledge of a child that can only be possessed by the bearer of that child, by the person from whose cells the child was grown. But there was no way that Kit could think of to begin a conversation about that kind of thing, so she reached unconsciously for her epistle, and caught herself and put it down again, and she looked across from where she was sitting at the kitchen table to where Moll was sitting on the hearth seat, and she told Moll to put a log on the fire, and she did so, and she pushed her hair back from the side of her face as she straightened again, and Moll all of a sudden in tremulous but clear voice started to talk, and Kit knew just enough about the fragile mechanics of such moments to be fully silent, to barely breathe, as her daughter made her first confession since her teenage years.
I never felt right inside, Mam. From when I was about ten or eleven. There was something wrong with me. Something I couldn’t put a name on. Miss Fahy said something one time in religion class about something that came a bit close to describing what I felt, and she said that it was natural and unnatural all at once, that because we were formed from the same stuff as animals that we were beholden to our animal natures and that we should pray whenever we felt any strange urges and ask God for strength and they would go away. But mine never went away. I was so ashamed of myself. It was this monstrous thing inside me, and it came in upon me every now and then, like the tide comes in on the sand, covering it completely and changing it, and there was never any way of stopping it or of reducing its power, and I never had a choice but to give myself to it, and I was always ashamed. I did things. And when I did it was like someone else was doing them and not really me. Just some other thing acting through me, using my body, possessing me. And then I thought maybe I was possessed, that the devil was stuck in me, and I decided to do away with myself. My plan was to get a bus to Limerick, and then to Ennis, and then to Lahinch, and I was going to walk to those big cliffs away up from Lahinch and throw myself off. But then I thought I’d be doubly damned for being a deviant and a suicide, and I made a new plan and I drew out my money from the post office and went to London on the ferry bus from Dublin port, and it was easier over there not to feel every minute as though I was damned to hellfire, and it was easy to feel as though I was dead in a way, because I thought to myself that you and Daddy would presume I was dead and so that would be the same thing anyway, and I felt terrible about that in one way because I knew how sad you’d be, but it was easier in another way not to have to feel sorry every second for the things in my head. Because there’s a world of people over there, millions and millions of them. And loads of them were like me.