‘Did you get my letter, Father?’ she asked him.

Of course she was going to ask you, he thought to himself. He sounded irritated as he responded. ‘Aye, I did. Thank you very much for that.’ He tried to move on. ‘Mrs Douglas, I hear you have one more daughter to add to the nine others,’ he said. ‘Father Joseph was telling me.’

Mrs Brogan was not to be deterred. ‘And did you pass on the news to the Malones, about their daughter, Father? So sad.’ She turned and said to the women behind her, ‘Her husband only went and died, leaving her a widow with two young children.’

‘Who – Mary Kate?’ one of the women asked, looking confused. ‘My God, when did she get married?’

Father Jerry jumped in, hoping to stop the conversation before it ran away with itself. ‘I did get your letter, Mrs Brogan. I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong Mary Kate, or at least your daughter did. Mary Kate Malone, she is home in Tarabeg with Michael and Rosie, and she was not married in Liverpool at all.’

Mrs Brogan looked hurt and bemused. ‘Oh, I know that, Father. Dana rang me. She’s coming home and she said to me very clearly, “You know Mary Kate from Tarabeg, Mammy, she’s gone back home, so I might pay her a visit when I’m there.”’ Gathering her confidence, she announced, ‘I am afraid it’s you that is wrong, Father. Mary Kate was married, although the poor girl is a widow now.’

Just at that moment the shop owner pushed something soft and pink into his hands. ‘There you go, Father – blush pink.’

By the time he reached the small café, the cake had been sold. Father Jerry swallowed down his annoyance as he sat at the table and comforted himself with tea and the ubiquitous brack. His annoyance was more with the Malones than the woman on the next table, obviously a tourist, going by her red lips and nails and the size of the camera around her neck, who was finishing off the last bit of his cake. The Malones were keeping something from him. He had protected the village from so much since the day Sarah had died; he could not allow sin to just walk right in unchallenged. He took his first unsatisfying bite of the enormous piece of buttered brack the waitress had placed on the table, mortified that she’d sold the last slice of Victoria sandwich only a moment before, possibly thereby losing one or two of her brownie points on the stairway to heaven. Staring sullenly out of the window, he was all too aware that the battle was raging, and for the first time in many years, he was losing.

*

‘Nola, did you bring some extra knives and forks with you?’ Peggy was laying the table and greeted Nola as she walked into the steam-filled kitchen.

‘I did that. How many are we expecting?’ Nola undid her headscarf and with a flick of her wrist shook off a film of raindrops and hung it on the back of the door.