Yet he himself did nothing. The things he had let slip, all the affairs to be settled, presented themselves before him with their own solutions. He was simply called on to be a witness to what had already been decided, in the same way as he witnessed marriages determined independently of him by fate, or rather by the claims of land or money or by the more mysterious workings of the spirit or the glands. And so, uninvolved, he found himself present at the two meetings called in the parish during the week.

Two meetings in Kilbride! The parish suddenly came to life, not only to life, but to a realization of its own existence. The last big meeting in parish memory was in 1932, the year Dev came tumultuously to power. There had been a meeting before that away back in the 1880’s or 1890’s – something to do with Home Rule, or was it the Land League – no one was quite sure. Kilbride slept like a hedgehog between meetings, but its winters lasted a generation or more.

The private meeting of James Conroy’s supporters was the first to be held. James had not called it, but he handled it as if he had. As he came in, the men sitting around the Kavanaghs’ kitchen stood up, even the most sullen of them. (They stood, not for him, but for Father Conroy, whom he ushered in before him.) He laid a black leather box on the table; it lay there for the rest of the evening, tempting the men’s wary eyes to stray to it, away from the business of the meeting. He sat on a kitchen chair on the outskirts of the crowd, having ushered Father Conroy into the armchair (which had been intended for himself), right next to the glowing coals.

James’s first step was to seek out possible allies and set aside the neutrals. He did this by smiling at the men, one by one, and inquiring after a new house or water supply or byre, thereby reminding all present of the state grant he had obtained for the embarrassed client (the grant would have been obtained anyway, without his intervention, but he had never let that fact be appreciated in his constituency). When, at last, the first angry questions assaulted him, he listened calmly, looking through the papers in his briefcase as if the answer were somewhere in there, if only he could find it. When the voices grew louder and his statement of the case had been greeted with derisive laughter, he went back to search in the briefcase, as if there were more there he had not said. At last, when the meeting threatened to get out of hand, he looked up suddenly at Father Conroy and, as if bringing up a matter of the utmost moment, said, “Tell me, Father Thomas, did you ever take a trip by plane from Dublin Airport?”