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By Root 318 0

he spray-gunned me with spittle, trenchant opinions and some libellous asides about our fellow summer-school attendees. After nearly an hour of bouncing around the Mayo lanes, the coach pulled into Ballintober Abbey, a few miles up the road from the burned-out shell of the family’s Moore Hall. The Professor took one look at the glutinous Crucifixion scene at the Abbey’s entrance. ‘Fuck this,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a drink.’ It was 11.05 a.m. The bar opposite the Abbey had just opened, and in no time he’d ordered a Guinness for me and a Smithwick’s and a Jameson’s chaser for himself. I’d not managed half the first Guinness when a second, and before long a third, landed at my side. A bearded head, slightly swimming in and out of focus, peered around the bar door. ‘Ah, there you are, you two,’ it said, and not with any hint of surprise. ‘Coach is off now, come on.’ I downed the third pint almost in one, and prayed that I wouldn’t be sick.

If the Professor had been voluble on the first leg of the trip, now that he was fortified by three pints and three whiskeys, there was no stopping him. He told me of a thwarted love affair with one of his male postgraduate students in Dublin, fixed me with a watery stare and slid his hand over my knee. For the rest of the weekend, he showered me with drinks and books, wrote poetry to me and told me some of the best gossip and the funniest, filthiest jokes I’d ever heard. On his insistence, I stayed with him on my way back through Dublin a few weeks later. On his insistence, I shared his bed. On my insistence, I all but stuck a bolster down the middle and primly rebuffed his hourly advances. Next day, as I prepared to leave for the boat and home, he presented me with a poem that he’d written in those dark, frustrated hours: ‘It is time to prise the lock apart / into the secret garden / which I address / on a sombre and ardent night. / The love-charged baton / crescendoes in eloquent silence’ (I don’t think I could have resisted the ‘garden/hard on’ rhyme myself, so fair play to him). In defence of my cock-teasing, I was 24, as prissy as porcelain and secretly convinced that there would be many other men who would want to write poetry to me. There weren’t, as it turned out.

I’ve long ago lost contact with the Reverend, and the Professor is, I gather from the all-mighty Google, now dead. I thought of them both fondly as I surveyed the stark walls of Ballintober Abbey. The lavish new biblical scenes that had so appalled the Rev had mellowed with age, though not as much as I had. In my 1991 notebook, I’d called Ballintober ‘the Alton Towers of the Catholic faith’, but it all looked rather sweet to me now. In Elizabeth’s House, the crockery-filled cave that had so amused me back then, I read an explanation sheet that detailed the Irish concept of muintearas, roughly translated as ‘hospitality’. ‘In the old Gaelic tradition the door was left open and food and drink were left on the table for the passing stranger . . . for often, often, often went the Christ in the stranger’s guise. Muintearas signifies welcome, warmth, hospitality and care.’

Two hundred yards up the road in my B&B, I was receiving muintearas by the bucket-load. I’d booked months earlier, as soon as I decided to walk the Tóchar Phádraig, but was dimly aware when I got there that there was some degree of surprise at my arrival. They had a family wedding going on, as well as a houseful of Dutch tourists. No matter: I was fixed with a pot of tea, home-made scones and fruit cake, and eventually asked if I’d mind taking their teenage daughter’s bedroom for the weekend. The girl in question was sitting in the kitchen in her pyjamas, texting her mates and telling us what a fierce night the previous evening, the wedding day of her cousin, had been. She gave away her bedroom without a mutter of complaint – ‘Ah sure, I’ll just sleep where I fall this weekend.’ Only the next day did her mum, truly the most capable hostess I’ve ever met, admit that they’d been expecting me the following weekend.

Reek Sunday didn’t so much dawn as become gradually