If he was still too weak to go to school the next day, his mother would bring him all the books of her childhood. The Six O'clock Saints, The Golden Legend, and little garishly coloured Lives of the Saints, where all the girl saints had ruby red lips.
‘You would have liked them Hils,’ he told her. ‘The stories of the saints are like your fairy tales. And they were all about us children. Ignatius Loyola, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Xavier, Catherine of Siena, and of course me, St John Vianney, patron saint of priests.’
His older brother Aquinas had drowned in the farm dam. Vianney had only been a toddler himself at the time. That was before the family had had to move to Lithgow. They said Aquinas had just wandered away, that he was lost in a split second. Must have unlocked the back gate himself. He was four years old. No one to blame. That was the collective mantra. No one to blame. His mother told them that Aquinas was now a special angel in heaven for the Ryan family. He had ‘been taken early by God’, as the people up at St Patrick’s Church said.
The phrase had haunted Vianney. As if God himself had taken Aquinas by the hand and led him there, taken the little boy to his watery death. ‘You know I have such vivid memories of lying in the bed,’ Vianney spoke softly, ‘puffed up by pillows, looking at the light move around the room, and feeling that God was somewhere out there, waiting in the wings, waiting to snatch little children away for some holy if obscure reason.’
‘Oh.’ Hilary had sucked her breath in, at the sorrow of it all. Little boy Vianney, his raven black hair and his cough, in bed in dark Lithgow with the red-lipped saints. Having to listen out for the divine killer of little children. While at his age she’d been out playing netball in the sunlight in Caringbah, in Sydney’s secular south. Not a ghost or a saint in sight.
'No, you don't understand' he said, not unkindly, but as if disappointed that he hadn't been able to make himself understood. She had practically sat up, waggled her ears and tail – to show her desire to understand – whatever it was he needed her to.
‘The thing was, Hils, it was all fantasy. Not just spiritual but cultural fantasy. Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s father, the empire we were reared for was already over. The Irish Catholic Church was gone.’ He said this laughing, brushing his hair behind his ears with his long fine fingers. ‘There was nowhere to go with my mother’s books of the saints. The time of the great faith and the great resistance was over.’
Vianney smiled. Whatever about the nonsense of the One True Faith, he had not lost his respect for that old culture of resistance. ‘But the village community around me, the Brothers up at the school, and Kate of course, the rosary addict, they all kept hoping the corpse would rise up.’ He laughed. ‘With my help!'
And who can blame them, Hilary had thought tenderly. It was so easy to see him as a luminous child visionary. You, the most beautiful man in the world.
***
‘No luck.’ Hilary reported back to Lolly/Claudia. Hilary had in fact rung Lolly but it was Claudia who picked up his phone. Lolly was out, she said, on one of his pro-bono nights with the St Francis refugee centre. What was it with these husband and wives who shared phones? ‘I’m afraid Xavier is still at large.’
Hilary did not like admitting this failure, her powerlessness over Vianney, to her sister–in-law, who was successful at everything; career, marriage to a hardworking, steadfast and obedient man, two beautiful daughters, and an almost paid off mortgage in Sydney’s famously overpriced Eastern Suburbs. Not that, to her credit, Claudia ever said anything about any of that.
Claudia also made no comment about the fact that she seemed to have married the only Ryan family member who could hold down a job. She made no boasts that she had wisely chosen prudent sobriety over Hilary’s choice, the choice of the foolish virgin, metaphorically speaking, of physical beauty and creative promise.
‘Can you look up Vianney’s iPhone contacts?’ Claudia asked, as if that was a normal question.
‘I thought you were a lawyer,’ Hilary laughed, ‘not a detective!’
‘Well can you?’ Claudia was relentless.
‘He has a password lock.’
‘And of course you don’t know it.’ Claudia made it sound as if Hilary was an unusual case. Perhaps she was.
‘Remember, Vianney is a Scorpio.’
Claudia chuckled. ‘Is that what you call it?’
Hilary felt that old, hot, defensive surge – the desire to protect Vianney. It straightened up her body as she stood looking out the window, at the neighbours in the next block of flats. The Man was sitting on the couch, stripped down to his shorts. The relentless TV was on. The Woman was currently out of sight. ‘Leave them alone,’ Vianney would growl if she commented on them. He did not share her view of neighbours as entertainment. ‘Let them be.’
‘It is so disappointing,’ Claudia was saying, ‘especially for Loyola.’
There was a pause, as if Claudia were pondering how else it might be done. Does she want me to search Vianney’s emails, Hilary wondered, and suddenly saw it, felt it, saw herself hunched over the computer, the adrenalin rush. But how would she ever guess the password Vianney never gave away.
Vianney treated his passwords as if they were the Da Vinci code. He rarely wrote them down, and certainly never together. It was incomprehensible to him why Hilary kept her passwords together on one piece of paper in the kitchen drawer, where, as he kept saying, anyone could find them. But how else was she to remember her Visa, GE, Hotmail, Apple, Commonwealth Bank, PayPal, Qantas Frequent Flyer, Facebook, LinkedIn, ASIC, Amazon, Gmail, Digital Pacific, Credit Union, Book Depository, Drop Box, and Skype accounts.
‘But I wonder if -’ Claudia was thinking aloud, slowly, deliberately, just like Lolly. Two lawyers. Jesus.
‘So I guess Lolly will just have to deal with it.’ Hilary interrupted, suddenly impatient with it all. He’ll just have to eat his green aeroplane jelly alone.
‘No.’ Claudia spoke firmly. ‘It’s very important for Loyola to have all his family with him at his fiftieth birthday.’
Hilary suppressed a laugh at the pomposity. Claudia had no idea how normal people spoke, or what they did. Her father was a judge or something ridiculous like that. Clever country boy Lolly Ryan had gone to Sydney Uni on a scholarship, and married up. Into boredom, Vianney said. Poor Lolly, weighed down by his responsibilities – the King Man of the Ryans. The favourite Eldest Son. His mother had set him up for life, Vianney said. She had bowed Lolly’s shoulders prematurely, and the early balding was surely all part of the package. Loyola Ryan was a sad Prince Charles character under the lash of the unlaughing Queen. He had been doomed from the beginning.
Hilary decided to come clean. ‘Actually Vianney thought it was Kate asking for Xavier’s whereabouts, through you guys.’
‘Kate?’ Claudia sounded genuinely surprised. ‘I am organising this party, not Kate. It is at our house.’
‘Yes, but is Kate invited?’
‘Well of course she is. She is their mother.’
‘Well, you know Vianney may not want to come then.’
‘Hilary,’ Claudia was now speaking very firmly to the five year olds she was so clearly dealing with. ‘When is Vianney going to -’ she slowed down her words even further, for emphasis, ‘get....over....it?’
Chapter 2 - The prospects of this country were never so hopeless
Letters from Irish bishops to the Irish College of Rome, 1879
‘The last winter was the most severe I could ever remember. The cold has been accompanied by drought until the middle of May, and though the rain