Brendan Harris had answered his ring. Eileen appeared at his shoulder.

Conor’s brother came down the stairs.

‘Fuck off,’ Conor’s brother said, and closed the door in Father Connelly’s face.

44

Katherine Culhane’s mother, who had suffered all her life from a nameless pain (undiagnosed, untreatable), eventually became so introverted, so reluctant to leave the house in Stillorgan and finally the bedroom, that Katherine had grown slowly sure that she too would end up housebound in middle age, sighing and shifting behind veils of cigarette smoke, so beset by auguries and terrors that she would be unable to walk past the gate at the end of the garden. By the time of Conor’s death, it hadn’t happened. Katherine had done a decent job of suppressing the more outlandish of her hereditary anxieties. She was known as a sprightly and personable woman. She wrapped presents for the Vincent de Paul at Christmas. She kept it together.

All of this changed once she found out that her son had killed Conor Harris.

How did Richard tell her? I find myself wondering. Did he sit her down in the kitchen with diffident gravity, holding her chair with that inbuilt politeness for which he was famed? Did he let the knowledge trickle through, via hints and gestures? Did he rely on the six o’clock news to get the conversation started? Or did Peter and Katherine find out only when the jacketed detectives knocked on the painted lumber of their fine front door, looking for their only son?

Picture the Culhanes, standing in the kitchen with the stubbled and deferential guards, staring at Richard as he confirms – with a nod, with his silence – what the guards have said. He wouldn’t have to have said or done anything incriminating, in the legal sense. Katherine, intuitively, would know what her son had done. And she would have been amazed by how much love she felt for him; astonished that her first instinct, in the face of such horror, was to cherish him, to clutch him to her breast and tell him he was already forgiven. But that is what heartbreak feels like: it feels like more love, at first, because love is always trying to become pain, as though pain were its fulfilment.

To Katherine, Richard was still the duffel-coated child (buttons painfully undone) that she had deposited in the bare yard on his first day of primary school. Richard, strange to say, had been an anxious child. ‘Mith the buth!’ he had lisped as a two-year-old, during the days before the Culhanes had been able to afford two cars and Katherine had brought him into town on one of the old green double-deckers. ‘Mammy! Mith the buth!’

In the year that followed her son’s arrest Katherine Culhane grew more and more like her mother. The meals she cooked became more elaborate, as her mother’s had. Now, every day, she served up three-course meals culled from cookbooks, as though, in hiding from the world’s complexity, she needed to create private elaborations, little domestic practices over which she had demonstrable control. She seldom left the house. She hired a Nigerian maid named Namwali to pick up her shopping every week, and when Namwali arrived with her carload of plastic bags, Katherine would insist on inviting her in for camomile tea and homemade cranberry muffins with ice cream. And Katherine would listen with terrible patience as Namwali told her hard-luck tale: emigration, poverty, isolation, abandonment.