Liars and Saints

On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs. Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there. The life that had come to an end had been one of good works and resolution, with a degree of severity in domestic and family matters. The anticipation of personal contentment, which had long ago influenced Mrs. Connulty's acceptance of the married state and the bearing of two children, had since failed her: she had been disappointed in her husband and in her daughter. As death approached, she had feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to. Her daughter she was glad to part from; her son--now in his fiftieth year, her pet since first he lay in her arms as an infant--Mrs. Connulty had wept to leave behind. The blinds of private houses, drawn do...

She keeps being sick. A woman in the washroom says: "You'd be better off in the fresh air. Wouldn't you go up on the deck?" It's cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke's, fifty pence each. They have Chawke's name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the bureau de change she has been given English notes in exchange for her Irish ones.  Not many people are traveling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in the corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses..... - Just in time for St. Patrick's D...