Saints and Sinners Read Online Free PDF

that was many miles from Camden. Friends donated things— sheets, bolsters, and a jam dish with a hanging spoon that carried a colored likeness of His Holiness the Pope. Soon he learned what a fine cook Grania was, but she was also very particular. For their Sunday walk, she would not let him out with a crease in his shirt, having already cleaned the clay under his nails with a crochet needle. The thing was (as he ruefully put it), Grania could drink any man under the table, but she knew when to stop. In the evenings when he got home, two glasses of milk would be on the table, to have with the dinner. But he was missing the pub, the noise, the gas, and before long he would be dropped off at The Aran and have a few drinks and arrive home late. Then later. Soon he pretended he was on overtime, and would not be home till midnight. A row would often follow, or else Crania would have gone to bed, his dinner, with a plate over it, on a rack above the gas cooker. One night he got back and found a note on the kitchen table —"You can have your overtime, now and forever," was all it said. He thought she would be back the next evening, or the next, but she wasn't.
    "She took nothing, not even the jam dish with the hanging spoon and the likeness of the Pope," he said, then broke off abruptly. One of the dogs from the playground had come in and was staring up at us, panting wildly. Rafferty put his hand on its snout and kept it there until the animal's breathing had quieted, and in the silence, I was conscious for the first time of a ticking wall clock.
    Considering the plethora of crimes we'd been warned of, I suggested taking a minicab and offered to drop Rafferty home.
    "Most kind," he said, which I knew to be his way of declining, followed by his raising the large hand, with the black, wide wristband.
    We were out of doors, sitting, as it happened, on a bench, in a graveyard that was anything but morose. A wide bordered path ran from a gateway to another at the opposite entrance, allowing a shortcut for pedestrians and cyclists, so that it was as much a haunt of the living as of the dead. The graves were neatly tended, the grass bank on the far side newly mowed, and there was the added gaiety of springtime in London. Borders of simmering yellow tulips, front gardens and back gardens surpassing each other in bounteous displays, the wisteria a feast in itself, masses of it falling in fat folds, the blue so intense it lent a blueness to the eyes themselves. Adrian had said that Rafferty would love a few moments with me if it was possible and hinted that he had super-duper news.
    He could not contain his joy. He was going home. For good. No more bills. No more hassle. Then he took the letter from his torn leather wallet, but hesitated before handing it to me, since he needed to explain the circumstances. A benefactor, who had begun life digging, but who had bettered himself and accrued great riches, had contacted the Centre, asking for someone of good character to come home to Ireland and take care of an elderly relative. Roisin, being the stalwart she was, had suggested Rafferty, and after a ream of letters, his credentials, et cetera, passed on, he was accepted. Moreover, she had given him a new tweed suit and pullover, since a fresh consignment had come from the Samaritan.
    The house, the dream house or bungalow to where he was going, would be shared with the elderly man, but a woman was coming in every day to do the dinner and keep an eye on the elderly man's needs, since he suffered from diabetes, something which he contracted later in life. Rafferty must have read the benefactor's letter dozens of times, as it had been folded again and again. Forty years previously, when he left Ireland, his mother, his lovely mother, had packed his things in a brown suitcase, and he had taken his belongings out, except for three sacred things; a missal, a crucifix, which she had had blessed, and striped pajamas, which he never wore, but had kept