excerpt
“Anyone awake?” he called.
He removed his hat and coat. The rack on the wall was so full of coats and hats that there was no room for his. He tossed them in a sodden heap on the floor.
No one answered his call. The silence shook like a curtain in a draught, then stilled again.
Halfway down the hall, which led to a kitchen at the back of the house, a broad flight of stairs climbed to the upper floor. To the right a door stood open, but the sitting room beyond it was as black as the night outside. To the left the door into the dining room was closed, but a sliver of light slid from below it. He crossed to this door and opened it.
A rosewood table, surrounded by chairs and covered with the sloppy remnants of a feast, almost filled the room. The air was stale with the smell of alcoholic drink. The lamp that was still burning stood on a large sideboard behind the open door. Its light shone on dirty plates and half-emptied dishes, on pottery mugs, glasses, and bottles, many with wine and porter in them. To the priest’s left, white lace curtains draped the deep-set window. In corner niches across the room gleamed the glass doors of two tall cabinets full of books, separated by the fireplace and chimney. In the hearth the turf had burned to ash, and the room was chilly. The long hand of the grandfather clock, that stood between one of the corner cabinets and the door leading into the kitchen, clicked forward to twenty-two minutes past two.
“Nothing has changed,” muttered the priest. “Nothing here will ever change.”
He took a few halting steps to the table, picked up and broke open a thick, round bap and stuffed it with slices of roast beef and cheese. As he munched his hastily prepared roll, he looked at the porcelain copy of the Victory of Samothrace that was the only ornament on the mantelpiece.
Finn’s pride, he remembered.
With the bap in one hand and the lamp in the other, the priest re-crossed the hall, silently as a cat, and entered the sitting room. It smelled of drink and smoke and snuffled with the heavy breathing of a stout, grizzled man who lay on his back on the sofa.
Seamus Slattery, you gross sinner. I might have known you’d be here.
Two persons sprawled on armchairs. One was a broad shouldered young man whom the priest did not know; the other was Joe Carney, a stocky fisherman from the village. Two others stretched their long, thin bodies on the woollen rug in front of the fireplace.
Libros Libertad 