‘With apologies to Shakespeare, two little touches of Harry in the night,’ Devlin said. ‘Captain Harry Fox, meet Father Harry Cussane.’
Cussane shook hands warmly. ‘A great pleasure, Captain Fox. Liam was telling me something about you after you rang earlier.’
Devlin indicated the chess table beside the sofa. ‘Any excuse to get away from that. He was beating the pants off me.’
‘A gross exaggeration as usual,’ Cussane said. ‘But I must get going. Leave you two to your business.’ His voice was pleasant and rather deep. Irish, yet more than a hint of American there.
‘Would you listen to the man?’ Devlin had brought three glasses and a bottle of Bushmills from the cabinet in the corner. ‘Sit’ down, Harry. Another little snifter before bed won’t kill you.’ He said to Fox, ‘I’ve never known anyone so much on the go as this one.’
‘All right, Liam, I surrender,’ Cussane said. ‘Fifteen minutes, that’s all, then I must go. I like to make a late round
at the hospice as you know and then there’s Danny Malone. Living is a day-to-day business with him right now.’
Devlin said, Til drink to him. It comes to us all.’
‘You said hospice?’ Fox enquired.
‘There’s a convent next door, the Sacred Heart, run by the Little Sisters of Pity. They started a hospice for terminal patients some years ago.’
‘Do you work there?’
‘Yes, as a sort of administrator cum priest. Nuns aren’t supposed to be worldly enough to do the accounts. Absolute rubbish. Sister Anne Marie, who’s in charge over there, knows to every last penny. And this is a small parish so the local priest doesn’t have a curate. I give him a hand.’
‘In between spending three days a week in charge of the press office at the Catholic Secretariat in Dublin,’ Devlin said. ‘Not to mention flogging the local youth club through a very average five performances ofSouth Pacific, complete with a star cast of ninety-three local school kids.’
Cussane smiled. ‘Guess who was stage manager? We’re tryingWest Side Story next. Liam thinks it too ambitious, but I believe it better to rise to a challenge than go for the easy choice.’
He swallowed a little of his Bushmills. Fox said, ‘Forgive me for asking, Father, but are you American or Irish? I can’t quite tell.’
‘Most days, neither can he,’ Devlin laughed.
‘My mother was an Irish-American who came back to Connacht in 1938 after her parents died, to seek her roots. All she found was me.’
‘And your father?’
‘I never knew him. Cussane was her name. She was a Protestant, by the way. There are still a few in Connacht, descendants of Cromwell’s butchers. Cussane is often called Patterson in that part of the country by pseudo-translation from Casan, which in Irish means path.’
‘Which means he’s not quite certain who he is,’ Devlin put in.
‘Only some of the time.’ Cussane smiled. ‘My mother
returned to America in 1946 after the war. She died of influenza a year later and I was taken in by her only relative, an old great-uncle who ran a farm in the Ontario wheat belt. He was a fine man and a good Catholic. It was under his influence that I decided to enter the Church.’
‘Enter the Devil, stage left.’ Devlin raised his glass.
Fox looked puzzled and Cussane explained. ‘The seminary that accepted me was All Souls at Vine Landing outside Boston. Liam was English professor there.’
‘He was a great trial to me,’ Devlin said. ‘Mind like a steel trap. Constantly catching me out misquoting Eliot in class.’
‘I served in a couple of Boston parishes and another in New York,’ Cussane said, ‘but I always hoped to get back to Ireland. Finally, I got a move to Belfast in 1968. A church on the Falls Road.’
‘Where he promptly got burned out by an Orange mob the following year.’
‘I tried to keep the parish together using a school hall,’ Cussane said.
Fox glanced at Devlin, ‘While you ran around Belfast adding fuel to the flames?’
‘God might forgive you for that,’ Devlin said piously, ‘for I cannot.’
Cussane emptied his glass. ‘I’ll be off then. Nice to meet you, Harry Fox.’