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least talk of one: Johnny Lacy told me that Father Kilgarriff had been unfrocked in Co. Limerick because of his love of a convent girl who was now in Chicago. It didn’t occur to me to question this account of the unfrocking, not even when Johnny Lacy described the convent girl’s teeth glistening in the dark confessional, and the tap of her heels on the tiles when she walked, her black-stockinged ankles slim and shapely. As if he’d been there he described how Father Kilgarriff had been on his knees for an hour in the bishop’s palace and how the ringed finger had been snatched away from his pleading grasp.
    Greatly intrigued by all this, I walked to Lough one afternoon and went into the Catholic chapel. Mrs Flynn referred to it as the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, a title I considered more pleasing than St Anthony’s Church of Ireland, which was what our own place of worship was called. The pews were of varnished pine; there were holy pictures on the walls and a cross on the altar. Lighted candles surrounded a Sacred Heart effigy, and the confessional smelt of dust, as if its green curtains needed airing. In the vestry there were more candles, locked away behind the two glass doors of a dresser. A red bulb gleamed beneath an image of Christ as a child, one hand raised in blessing, a puffy crown on the figure’s head. A surplice hung from a hook on the wall and in a corner there was a sweeping brush. I wondered if Father Kilgarriff and the convent girl had stood together in such a vestry. I wondered if his hand had reached out to touch her, as the man on the log-box reached out towards the woman. ‘A grievous sin,’ Johnny Lacy had said in a sombre voice. ‘That’s what the bishop would have called it, Willie, a most grievous sin.’
    But Tim Paddy hinted that this story should be taken with a pinch of salt. Tim Paddy was known to be jealous of Johnny Lacy, to envy him his easy ways and his success in Fermoy’s dance-hall. He gloomily described to me the girls Johnny Lacy used to buy biscuits and sweets for, the prettiest girls of the night’s dancing. ‘Like Josephine,’ he added one day.
    Tim Paddy was painting a greenhouse when he said that and he slanted his head as he spoke, drawing his white-coated brush along a line of putty. Inside the greenhouse his father was pricking out seeds and I knew that if he had not been there Tim Paddy would have lit a cigarette and settled down for a conversation.
    ‘Your sister’s right,’ he said. ‘She has better looks than that Kitty had.’
    ‘I thought you liked Kitty, Tim Paddy.’
    He wrinkled his ferret’s nose, dipping the brush into the paint. ‘I wouldn’t give you twopence for her.’ Again he drew his paint-brush along the edge of the putty, one eye on his father’s bent head. ‘Josephine’s different,’ he said.
    O’Neill came out of the greenhouse and told Tim Paddy to be sure to remove any splashes of paint from the glass. It was his arthritis that caused the old man’s cantankerousness: when his affliction was particularly bad he used to crawl about on his hands and knees among the vegetables and flowerbeds, like some creature from the woods. That and his hairless head made him seem old enough to be Tim Paddy’s grandfather.
    ‘Don’t be idling with the boy,’ he muttered before re-entering the greenhouse. ‘Get on with your work now.’
    Tim Paddy made a face, continuing to paint the narrow surfaces of wood and putty. I went away and stared at the rows of sprouting peas, and the twigs that had been stuck into the soil to attract their tendrils. Traps had been set among the beans to catch fieldmice.
    Tim Paddy was in love with Josephine, I said to myself, and that was the third of the Kilneagh love stories. I went in to tea and there she was in her afternoon black. She was eighteen years old, although I did not know it at the time: ages afterwards, when I was no longer shy with her, nor she with me, she told me her eighteenth