Paddy wanted to climb the bell-tower and out through it onto the spire of the Church of Mary Magdalene and up to the summiting cross and hang from it and holler to the village and the valley and the hills and the rivers and the lake that she was home, she was back, she was safe, and every tear could be wiped away. But halfway down the lane he checked himself. There were sorrows in the village that could never be so quickly and so wholly healed. In the five years since Moll had gone there had been many additions to the roll of heartbreak in the townlands of the parish, some from the swiping blade of time, its terrible but expected cull, and some from less natural things: two fine young lads had done away with themselves not a month apart and no clue left behind them as to why; a baby had been lost soon after its birth; a man with young children had been crushed by a bullock in a pen and hadn’t the use of himself any more, nor ever would again. Paddy couldn’t be crowing up and down the roads about his happiness. He wouldn’t be thanked for it. And so he stopped at the middle gate, the halfway point where the lane bent with the fall of the hill, and sat for a few quiet minutes on the step of the stile in the shade of the oak, and listened to the rustling meadow and the cocking thrills of wrens and sparrows, and the happy new-born bleats of lambs, and a cow’s terrible lowed mourning for her slaughtered calf, and thought about how best to break his news. And the upshot of his contemplation was that there was no way to know how to do it properly, how to mitigate the hurt and offence his reversed fortunes might cause to others, and so he turned and faced into the westering sun, back up the lane to home, where he found his daughter sleeping and his wife on her knees beside her bed, her head bowed and her fingers laced together in silent prayer.
Moll had gotten the bus out from Nenagh and the driver hadn’t known her because he was new, a townie lad, pleasant enough but too narrow-arsed to properly fill the dent Frankie Welsh had left on his retirement in the cracked vinyl of the driver’s seat. But she’d been spotted by a few of the Ballymoylan crowd, who’d half known her to see her, and some of them had mentioned in Gleeson’s shop at the bottom of Ballymoylan Hill, and more had mentioned in the Shouldices’ shop at the top of Ballymoylan Hill, that they were full sure that that girl of the Gladneys from Knockagowny who went missing years ago was after getting the bus out from Nenagh and getting off at the cross below the lane up to Gladneys, and from there the whisper was carried quickly back downhill to the village, and in and out of various houses, and the presbytery and pub and shop, and for a finish a small delegation formed itself by the pump, and organized itself into an advance party of three people well known to the subjects, who would walk up the lane to the Gladney cottage and find out which or whether, and a larger body that would stand hard by the pump and wait for news. Someone then thought of the Jackmans, and the proprietary interest they had in the affairs of the Gladney family and their tiny homestead. Should a phone call be placed to their house from the post office out of courtesy before the sortie up the lane? It seemed vaguely as though that would be the correct course of action, but no one was exactly sure why. This was new territory, and how best to go about the charting of it was anyone’s guess. And so, in the very same moment that Paddy Gladney rose from the stile by the gate at the bend of the lane and turned back homeward, the congregation lost its collective nerve and, with a half-hearted resolution, proposed and agreed between them all that they would wait and see, that Mass on Sunday would tell a lot, disassembled and dispersed, and no one braved it up that day to see was the prodigal daughter really returned.
So Kit and Paddy had a short time of near perfect peace, that Friday afternoon and all the next day, and the swirling questions about where Moll had been and what she’d been doing and why she hadn’t written to them to let them know she was alive at least, and why she had taken herself off in the first place, were no more bothersome than a gentle breeze through the top of the half-door would be, and they were able just to look at her, to watch her sleeping, to listen to her even breaths, and the soft whistle in her exhalations that caused Kit to suspect that the girl had taken up smoking, but if she had itself what about it? And Moll slept on and on into that first night back, and the moon was huge and brilliant in the sky, and Kit and Paddy lay side by side, the soft silvery light of it draped across the blanket of their marital bed, Paddy holding Kit’s hand tight, Kit whispering, over and over, Thanks be to God, thanks be to God, and they slept by unspoken agreement in short restless shifts, for fear it seemed that Moll might rise and spirit herself away again without them hearing her leaving. And when the new day dawned Moll was sleeping still, and her parents were standing by her bed, gazing at her with all the sacred wonder and unbridled love of two people beholding their cradled new-born.
She’d been in England, that whole time. She gave them the solid spine and the bare bones of her story, sitting up in bed in her nightdress, one of her old ones that Kit had kept laundered and aired with the rest of the clothes she’d left behind, because she seemed to have returned empty-handed or as good as, only a small bag on a long strap hanging thinly off her shoulder. She looked so beautiful in her laundered nightdress and so innocent, and there was little about her to betray the passage of half a decade of time, and she was talking softly and shyly, the way she always used to, the way that had always made Kit feel satisfied that she had raised a daughter who was without boldness or cheek or any impudent forwardness, and at the same time despair that she would end up a spinster, unable to put herself out there for the noticing, for the attracting of a decent man. Kit was sitting on the bed beside her holding her hand, and Paddy was sitting awkwardly further down on the same side of the bed, twisted at a funny angle so that he could see past Kit to Moll while she spoke, and neither parent interrupted the sweet song for fear it would never again be sung.
She’d worked in the dining room of a hotel, a huge place with a lobby far bigger than a church, and chandeliers like bunches of stars hanging low from a ceiling so high you could hardly see it, and she’d worked before that in a grocery shop with high narrow aisles filled with packets and jars of all kinds of strange foods, all delivered daily in lorries, and unloaded by a forklift truck, and the man who drove the forklift truck was Irish, but from Cavan, up near the border with the North, and he had a very funny way of talking, drawing out his words so that it seemed sometimes your whole tea-break would be over before he was finished with even one sentence. The man who owned the shop was from Pakistan, but he was so kind you’d nearly think he was Irish, and he knelt down on a mat to pray several times every day because he was a Muslim, and so were nearly all his customers, and so were a good share of the people in London, and there were people there of every colour and shape and size, and people who wore scarves tied up high on their heads and men who wore robes like long dresses and there were men who looked and dressed like women, and there were men with tattoos all over their arms and necks and even their faces and heads. Paddy Gladney felt, as he listened to his daughter speak, a sudden coldness, and a crawling on his skin, and a prickling in his fingertips and toes as his heart palpitated at the thought of the dangers his only daughter had faced, walking alone in a huge city, in a foreign place, surrounded on all sides by people who couldn’t be known, or trusted not to rob her, or slash her throat, or defile her, or to throw her bodily over the rail of a bridge into some filthy river.