Well, he had the few quid in the back of the cupboard at home. If they didn’t even want that from him, he would find someone who would. He bent down and puffed at the faintly burning coals. An old bellows, that’s all they thought him, full of angry wind. Now, who the hell said that?

*

The flames were spurting between the coals when he heard another car stop in the yard. A few moments later, Uncle James came bouncing into the room. “Ah, Father Tom!” The hand was extended, the old politician’s hand, rubbed smooth by a half-century of shaking and being shaken. “It’s a change to find you on your knees.”

Father Conroy smiled. “My knees can take it.” But he got up as quickly as he could, taking a chance on the pain in his leg.

James fitted himself into the biggest armchair. “Jimmy says you’re not looking so well. Bedad, he’s right. You’re not! Not at all well!”

“Never felt better.”

“Ah, well, I suppose none of us are as young as we were.”

“I hope I’ll look as fresh as you do, Uncle James, in my old age.”

There was a truce while James got out his pipe and proceeded to fill it. This took a long time. He had a gadget for cleaning it and another for tamping down the tobacco in the bowl, but first he had to select the gadgets needed from the paraphernalia in his breast pocket – the row of fountain pens and pencils, nailfiles, and combs.

Even as a child, Father Conroy used to be fascinated by Uncle James’s gadgetry – the gold chain across the waistcoat, the half-hunter watch that struck the hours, the plaques presented for various services rendered. One of his memories of the Black and Tan War was of the distant figure of his uncle squatting at the bottom of a field in Rosnagree, tinkering with explosives. He remembered James setting off at the head of an I.R.A. column with a row of bombs jangling from the handlebars of his bicycle. From time to time, reports came in from different parts of the county as the bombs went off. One of them blew the thatched roof off a forge, against which the bicycle had been left leaning – a spectacular fireworks effect, as he had imagined it, hardly considering at all the aftermath, when a truckload of Tans coming to investigate were shot to death by James and his men.

When the pipe was filled, James fussed with it, as if it were about to explode any moment. Even when it was going well, he took it out of his mouth and looked at it, as if he suspected it of disagreeing with him – an agent, perhaps, of the opposition party. During the silence, Kate came in to pour him a half-tumbler of whiskey. As she bent anxiously to put more coal on the fire, she nudged Father Conroy and whispered, “Let ye be talking, anyway.”