Chance, causality, and responsibility

Chance, causality, and responsibility form a central problem in Cushla Lavery’s attempt to understand Michael Agnew’s death and its consequences. The novel makes the killing feel at once connected to a web of choices and brutally contingent: a remembered slip of a name, a boy’s chance encounter with a barrister, and events that might have unfolded differently. Cushla searches for a cause that can make the catastrophe intelligible, but the narrative leaves her with a chain of possibilities rather than a complete account of motive or blame.

A catastrophe reconstructed

After the McGeown home burns and Tommy McGeown is arrested, Cushla replays what she knows, trying to discover whether she inadvertently linked the boy to Michael. She considers whether she mentioned Michael to Tommy, whether Davy McGeown could have connected them, or whether Betty McGeown had learned something. The possibilities do not hold equally: Cushla dismisses Davy as a child and doubts that Betty could have supplied the missing knowledge. She also recognizes that Seamie McGeown, badly impaired, could not have masterminded an assassination. Yet the arrest makes her wonder whether some connection exists, while the danger to the family is real regardless of what Tommy knows: Fidel and Leslie may see the Laverys as sheltering the family of a boy who killed a Protestant customer.

A small exchange acquires disproportionate weight in this search. On Easter Sunday, Tommy had phoned to thank Cushla for chocolate, and she had answered by asking whether the caller was Michael. Later, Tommy recalled that moment to her. Cushla worries that the name might have given him a clue, although she had not used Michael’s surname and recognizes that Michael could be anyone. The detail is neither proof of a link nor meaningless to her: in the aftermath, it becomes one more event she can replay, scrutinize, and fear she has caused.

Her uncertainty persists as she tries to manage the immediate aftermath. She considers going to the estate to salvage clothes or furniture, but remembers the neighbours’ fury; instead, she plans to seek emergency help through the school and parochial house and to call Gerry Devlin. The next morning she tells herself Tommy has not been charged and will be released, that the killing was a mad coincidence, and that the McGeowns will be rehoused. At the breakfast table, with Davy still marked by soot and Mandy eating grimly, she consults the Yellow Pages for the Housing Executive, the police, and, as a last resort, social services. Practical tasks continue while the meaning of the events remains unsettled.

A past made to look connected

Cushla’s questioning expands after she leaves the Royal Ulster Constabulary station. She remembers that the police had followed Michael, photographed him outside his flat, and noted the cars passing his home. She cannot tell whether their surveillance began because of her or preceded the affair. In retrospect, she sees the relationship with Michael and her friendship with Davy as strands that had seemed to run separately but had become twisted together, each informing the course of the other. This recognition changes how she reads the past without resolving exactly how information travelled or what caused the killing.

She tests the history against alternatives. Had Davy remembered to put on a coat? Had Seamie remained on the dole for another month instead of finding himself alone on a dark street after drinking stout? Had Michael not walked into the pub on a quiet February night in his white shirt? Had Betty persuaded Tommy to stay in school? Cushla’s counterfactuals encompass small decisions, vulnerability, violence, and missed opportunities. They do not establish that any one alteration would certainly have prevented the murder; their force lies in showing how many contingent circumstances she can imagine as possible turning points.

The most personal alternative is that Michael might still be alive if he had never met Cushla. She places herself inside the chain as a possible condition, not merely as a witness to events. The question gives her guilt a precise form, but not a conclusive answer: the narrative offers no basis for treating her affair or her friendship with Davy as a demonstrated cause of Michael’s death. Her sense of responsibility grows from proximity and hindsight, while the causal account remains incomplete.

The trial and the limits of explanation

A newspaper account of Tommy’s trial supplies facts where Cushla’s earlier suspicions had supplied conjecture. Tommy is eighteen, refuses to recognize the court, offers no defence, and answers no questions. He is convicted on evidence described as forensic, circumstantial, and damning. The account says that he had been repairing a path at a house opposite Michael’s. When rain began, and knowing the family was out, Michael invited him inside for tea.

Cushla imagines the ordinary hospitality of that visit: Michael moving between kettle and sink, taking down cups and looking for biscuits, and trying to put an awkward boy at ease. She wonders whether Tommy warmed to him, whether they laughed, and whether Michael spoke about his own son. These are questions and reconstructed possibilities, not established testimony. Cushla also pictures Tommy seeing a photograph of Michael in wig and gown on the dresser and wrongly concluding that the man serving him tea was a judge. She cannot know whether that supposed mistake presented an opportunity then, or whether the idea came later when Tommy spoke to his cousin about his work. The trial establishes the encounter and conviction; it does not answer all the questions Cushla builds around them.

The newspaper image of Tommy resembles the mugshots Cushla had seen in Michael’s folder. She reads fear in his eyes, even as his expression recalls the bold, lean boy she last saw. The contrast between a public case record and Cushla’s imagined kitchen scene sharpens the distance between evidence and explanation: the conviction names responsibility in law, while her unanswered questions concern how the boy arrived at the act and what, if anything, connected him to Michael beforehand.

Coincidence without consolation

After reading the account, Cushla sits on the car bonnet to smoke, leaving the package of photographs on the passenger seat. The lambs she and Michael had once seen in a field are now fat on the grass. The returning image marks elapsed time and the survival of ordinary life alongside the death she is trying to comprehend. Cushla concludes that there had been no connection after all, only bad luck of the kind that happens often there. That conclusion answers one fear—that she had unknowingly linked Tommy to Michael—but does not undo the killing or establish every part of its cause.

The novel returns to this tension years later, when Cushla and a man stand beside Penny’s gauzy monument to Michael. He identifies the murdered man as the person their Tommy killed and asks how likely it is that they should find themselves there. Cushla knows the meeting is happenstance, as the earlier encounter that placed Tommy in Michael’s kitchen on a wet morning was happenstance. The parallel does not turn either meeting into fate. Instead, it shows how coincidence can acquire weight after the fact, once loss has made the events around it impossible to regard as merely incidental.

Their exchange also brings the past into the present without resolving it into a moral formula. The man asks whether she is still Miss Lavery; she says she has long been Mrs McTiernan and asks him to call her Cushla. The changed name registers a life lived beyond the crisis, while the memorial keeps Michael’s death present between them. The novel’s treatment of chance therefore avoids both a simple chain of blame and the comfort of pure randomness: decisions and circumstances have consequences, but hindsight cannot make every contingency legible or identify a single person as the condition on which the whole tragedy depended.