‘What time do we have to be at Fergal Maguire’s retirement dinner tonight?’ said Ralphie.
Eden clapped her hand over her forehead. ‘I had totally forgotten it was tonight,’ she said. ‘Oh shit. I’m supposed to be at the motorway meeting—’
‘You’re not, I cancelled it.’
‘You cancelled what?’
‘You’re supposed to be at the motorway planning meeting and I cancelled on your behalf – or rather, to be precise, my mum cancelled on your behalf. Because I knew you’d forget.’
Eden went over and hugged him.
‘Thank you, and send on the hug to your mother. Do you think she’d come and work for me?’
That was one of the reasons why Eden really wanted to get into politics on a national level, because then you’d have people to help you. So far, she was doing so much of it on her own.
‘I’ll ask,’ said Ralphie. ‘That green suits you, you look very much the colleen at the crossroads of the 1937 Constitution fame.’
‘Do you think?’ said Eden, laughing. The colleen, an Anglicised version of the Irish word for girl, was an imaginary dancing girl in a green dress dancing at a rural crossroads, seen as the epitome of happy, traditional Irishness by Church and State of the time. She wasn’t mentioned in the Constitution but her innocent obedience to all rules, especially the moral ones, made the colleen the perfect ideal of the genuflecting politics of the day.
‘Yes, beautiful, you’ll knock them dead.’
She grinned. ‘As long as your father’s henchman, Rian, dies, I don’t care how it happens,’ she said.
Green turned out to be exactly the right colour for the centenarian. She herself wore a long black nun’s habit with silky pearly white hair creeping in little curls from under her headdress. She did not mention a lifetime spent drinking whiskey, smoking and running after strange men. Although she said she’d heard how that had helped other people.
Prayer, she told Eden. Prayer works – and honey, always have honey. It cured everything. Walking and gardening helped too.
Sister Agatha had a list of things that had helped keep her going for a hundred years. Humour was certainly on the list – she had the most glorious sense of humour and was delighted to see Eden with her shoulder-length red hair in the green silky blouse with the pussy-bow neck.
‘I had a thing just like that,’ she said, ‘before I was professed. It was my sister’s but I used to borrow it.’
‘Really,’ said Eden, sitting down and taking a sip of her tea.
‘Oh yes, my sister had all the best clothes,’ said Sister Agatha. ‘All the best clothes. They thought she was going to marry a local farmer and the money went on her.’
It was funny, Eden thought to herself, that even eighty-five years down the line, Sister Agatha could still sound like an aggrieved younger sister, irritated with the older one for getting the better outfits.
‘Yes, but I borrowed that one from her once, the green one like the one you’ve on there. She went pure mad, pure mad is all I can say. I did plenty of penance for it, but I had my offers when the local fellows saw me in it.’
‘Did you now,’ said Eden, grinning. She loved this woman.
There was a photographer from the local paper there, but the reporter was late. A few nuns bustled around, all small and elderly like Sister Agatha herself.
‘She’d still steal any outfit you had if you didn’t keep an eye on it,’ said another nun, a Sister Rita, whose hair was a quite improbable shade of red under her headdress.
Eden giggled.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Sister Agatha, beaming. ‘What do we have to steal?’
‘I have that Aran cardigan and you’ve taken it plenty of times,’ Sister Rita said.
‘If it was mine, I’d lend it to you whenever you wanted it,’ said Sister Agatha. ‘I only took it that one time, a year ago when I was ninety-nine.’
‘And you didn’t feel the need of it today?’ said Eden, the corners of her mouth twitching up.
‘No,’ said Sister Agatha, rolling her eyes. ‘She gave out yards to me for it the last time. I said, “Rita, when you get to be my age, you have to borrow the odd thing, you know, because you’re not going to be around long enough to go through the effort of knitting another cardigan. Or indeed buying a cardigan.” Anyway, look at these hands.’
She held up frail but arthritic fingers. ‘I couldn’t knit another cardigan, not like that one.’
