Love and Summer

‘Not in Rathmoye he doesn’t,’ Miss Connulty retorted with razor sharpness. ‘Not by a long chalk.’

‘I’m only telling you what’s reported.’

The conversation took place in the big front room, Joseph Paul in an armchair with the newspaper he’d been reading open on his knees, his sister standing by the mantelpiece.

‘Have you had words with him?’ she asked.

‘I have no intention of approaching this man in any way whatsoever. There isn’t a reason in the wide world why I should cause offence to a man I don’t know just because he rides his bicycle through the town.’

‘He’s trying something on with Ellie Dillahan. You can tell it by the way of her.’

‘There’s no reference in what Miss O’Keeffe found out that this fellow is after any woman.’

‘Whatever state that girl’s in, she’s not in it for nothing. ’

‘We don’t know anything about what state Ellie Dillahan is in. You’re confused about the entire matter. This fellow’s a separate entity altogether from Ellie Dillahan.’

‘Have you no pity in you at all? Have you no pity for Dillahan, what he’s been through? She found a home with him, the two of them suited in misfortune, and the next thing is you have an interloper up to no good.’

Miss Connulty didn’t listen when her brother again refuted that, gesturing with his hands, explaining something she didn’t want to hear. You couldn’t blame him, he understood nothing. Since the day he’d been born he’d been protected and cosseted, the world withheld from him. Word would get to Dillahan about his young wife’s infatuation and who’d blame him for what would happen next?

‘If Dillahan turns her out she’ll come here,’ Miss Connulty promised with sudden, fierce determination. ‘Ellie Dillahan will live in this house and hold her head up.’

19

One of the yard doors had worked itself loose from the higher of its two hinges and Dillahan raised it, settling it on a couple of logs and steadying it with a prop.

The screws came out easily. He marked with the point of a bradawl a new position for the hinge and pierced the wood of the jamb just deep enough to hold the screws in place before he drove them in.

‘Come November, we’ll renew the creosote. Did we do it last year? I doubt we did.’ He swung the door. ‘How’s that then?’

But Ellie, who had been in the yard, had gone back to the house. Standing a little to one side of the kitchen window, she watched her husband returning the logs he had used to the woodshed, then gathering up his tools. She willed him to hurry, to get on with it, to go. Impatience kept her at the window, concealed from the yard because of the way she stood, close to the wall. It wouldn’t take a minute, he had said, but he’d been there an hour, his sandwiches made and in the tractor, his flask filled. He would be all day in the fields, he’d said earlier, the brambles to clear, and rotavating the arable.

He came into the kitchen although there was no need to. ‘It’s all there in the tractor,’ Ellie said, thinking when she heard herself that he wouldn’t ever have heard her speaking so curtly before, but he appeared not to notice. He delayed for another ten minutes, looking for something in one of the dresser drawers and not finding it. He said what he had said already about the brambles and the arable.

From the window she watched while he dragged the rotavator out of its shed and coupled it behind the tractor. When he’d driven off, taking the dogs with him, her impatience still lingered. It was alien to her and she hated it.

Florian had not revealed that Shelhanagh had been up for sale and now was sold; or that as soon as it was no longer his he would leave Ireland. Time after time, walking among the monks’ graves or on the Lisquin avenue, or in the tearooms or at Enagh, he had resolved that before they parted he would say at last what must be said. But time after time he hadn’t. Was it reluctance to cause pain that influenced his silence? Or a reluctance to bring abruptly to an end a liaison that had differently begun and now was pleasure? Or was it simply that his fondness for concealment had taken charge, as often in the past it had? He didn’t know. When he procrastinated it felt right to do so, yet he knew that what he withheld did not belong to him and would happen anyway, brushing him aside.

Waiting this morning on the lower slopes of Gortalassa, by the red barn where they had agreed to meet, he became more urgently aware of that, and Ellie’s lateness brought time’s dominance to mind: there was less of it left than he’d imagined.

Still waiting, he saw her in the distance. How well he knew her now, he reflected. Her grey-blue eyes, the softness of her lips, her voice, her smile, her shy composure. Which dress would it be today? he had become used to wondering before they met, and did so again. The blue, the green, the one with the honeysuckle pattern? How well he knew the bangle that had been her husband’s wedding present, the Woolworth’s brooch the nuns had given her, her battered handbag. How well he knew the innocence and the gentleness that first had stirred his sympathy and still did.

They pushed their bicycles on the track that began beside the barn. Today they would climb higher than they had when they’d been to Gortalassa before: they hoped to reach the corrie lakes.

They left their bicycles where the track petered out and climbed up to the ring of standing stones. While they rested there, he told her.

‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why are you going away?’

‘When the house is sold there’ll be nowhere for me to live in Ireland.’

‘I didn’t know your house was for sale.’

‘There are debts that have to be paid.’ He paused a moment. ‘It would have spoilt our summer if I had told you earlier.’

She looked away and he knew she was afraid to ask how long they had left.

‘The rest of summer,’ he said as if she had. ‘There’ll be a date. Oh, ages off. October perhaps.’

‘Is that when you’ll be going?’

‘Yes, it is.’

He watched a jet plane trailing its ribbon of white against the washed-out paleness of the sky. He watched the white evaporating, the last of its shreds falling apart.

‘Is it for ever you’ll be going?’

‘It is for ever.’

‘Like the St Johns?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Larks flitted from one high stone to another. Above a carcass not yet picked over a buzzard was stationary in the air. Higher on the hillside a lone sheep moved slowly.

‘Don’t be unhappy, Ellie.’

She shook her head. She didn’t speak.

‘I had to tell you.’

‘I know you did. I know.’

They climbed through ferns and bracken, the bog-land dry. They skirted an escarpment because it was a shorter way. A distant Angelus bell chimed faintly in the stillness.

He would go and that he was gone would be her first thought every morning, as her first thought now was that he was here. She would open her eyes and see the pink-washed walls as she saw them now, the sacred picture above the empty grate, her clothes on the chair in the window. He would be gone, as the dead are gone, and that would be there all day, in the kitchen and in the yard, when she brought in anthracite for the Rayburn, when she scalded the churns, while she fed the hens and stacked the turf. It would be there in the fields, and with her when she stood with her eggs waiting for the presbytery hall door to open, and while Miss Connulty counted out her coins and the man with the deaf-aid looked for insulation guards or udder pads. It would be there while she lay down beside the husband she had married, and while she made his food and cut his bread, and while the old-time music played.

‘Do you want to go?’ she asked.

‘Everything is over for me in Ireland now.’

‘I wish you weren’t going.’

They reached the corrie lakes. The summer they had known and still knew now would never not be theirs, Florian said - the dusky woods at Lyre, the maze at Olery, the lavender, the butterflies. His Cloonhill, what he had made of it, her Shelhanagh. ‘All that,’ he said. Memory did not let go.

He knew it wasn’t solace, but he could do no better. Despair could not be blown away and, although he didn’t want to, he remembered his when he blurted out what for so long he had concealed. They had been reading in the garden and they went on reading afterwards, and Isabella said nothing.

Above the three small lakes, hardly more than pools, the bleak rockface was sheer. Out of the sun’s reach, the water was dark and icy still. There were no birds, no other life, no sound. It was a place he might have come to when he fumbled with photography, Florian thought. But memory would more tellingly preserve it.

Their faces were cold against each other for a moment before they parted. Where would he go? she asked.

‘Perhaps Scandinavia,’ he said.

On the way back to Shelhanagh, Florian called in at the Dano Mahoney public house. Two drinkers at the bar looked up, interrupting a conversation about greyhounds. The ex-pugilist landlord nodded a curt welcome. Florian took his glass to the corner table he had occupied on the day of Mrs Connulty’s funeral.

His father had first brought him here, the landlord different then, a friendlier man whom his father had seemed to know well. A few days after his mother’s death that was, a time when his father kept saying he needed a drink. There had been reminiscences then too, of Italy, of love, of finding the house when they ran away to Ireland, of the legacy that came eventually from Genoa and how that had felt like being paid to stay away so as not to be an embarrassment to the Verdecchias. ‘I always liked the Verdecchias, though,’ his father confessed. ‘Because they were her people, I think.’

Born a Catholic but lapsing in her faith, Florian’s mother had been buried in the small Protestant churchyard in Castledrummond so that when the time came she and his father would not be separated. ‘We liked arranging things,’ his father said in the Dano Mahoney Bar. ‘We enjoyed all that.’ Isabella hadn’t come to either funeral. Florian had thought she would.

Of the two, he was the less good painter, his father used to say, but Florian now could not separate the watercolours that were left behind into who had painted which. Nor could he, sometimes, separate his mother and father as people, for with the years they had grown alike, although they had themselves insisted that once they’d been quite notably different and given to disagreement.

‘He’s asking near four hundred for his animal.’ The voice of one of the drinkers carried from the bar and then was hushed. Another man came in. He asked to use the telephone because a bullock had fallen down a ravine.

Florian finished his wine and his cigarette and then he cycled on. He would have to see to the grave before he left, and he wondered who would do that when he did go.

He was hungry and went round by the Greenane half-and-half for bread and porksteak, and to arrange with Mrs Carley to leave the hall-door key with her when the day came. Riding on to Shelhanagh afterwards, he realized that his nostalgic reflections in the roadside bar had been an effort to brush away an uneasy day. It was no more than the truth that he had sought to prolong a friendship which summer had almost made an idyll of. But what he had failed to anticipate was the depth of disappointment its inevitable end would bring. He had allowed the simple to be complicated. He had loved being loved, and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough. ‘Dear Flor, what a muddle you are!’ Isabella’s favourite word for him, repeated often in Italian and in English with cousinly affection. He had liked the word then; he didn’t now.

That night, in her sleep, Ellie wept. She tried to wake up in case her sobs were heard. She could hear them herself but when she managed to rouse herself she found her husband undisturbed. Her pillow was wet and she turned it over, and in the morning her tears had gone as if she had imagined them, but she knew she hadn’t.

20

A few days after his revelation that he was to leave Ireland Florian found, beneath a pile of straw fish baskets in what had once been a pantry, a leatherbound record book he had years ago concealed there. He gathered up the mildewed baskets to take to his garden bonfire and saw again the handsomely embossed lettering: The Huntsman’s Fieldbook. He had hidden it and couldn’t remember where, had repeatedly searched the house before giving up.

He turned pages that were familiar to him, at the bottom of each a tidily boxed paragraph of printed notes, with occasionally an illustration, concerning the nature and habitat of various forms of wildlife, its preservation or destruction. The only handwriting, on faint grey lines, was his own.

He threw the fish baskets on to his fire and, watching the straw blaze up, remembered being ashamed to tell Isabella when she returned to Shelhanagh the following summer that he’d forgotten where he’d hidden the Fieldbook, saying instead that he had thrown it away. Isabella hadn’t been entirely blameless in all this herself. There always was a rush at the end of her July visits. This time, her luggage in the hall, she had left the Fieldbook on her bed and, discovering later that she had, fiercely instructed Florian to see to its concealment. It was important, or seemed so then, since secrecy came into so much of what she and Florian did.

In the kitchen he shook the dust from the pages and wiped the leather cover with a damp cloth. His handwriting hadn’t changed with the passage of time. Square and firm, in clear black ink, it still was that. Seven years ago it was, Florian calculated, and was just beginning to read how he had filled the blankness above some information about the feeding practices of the carp when the hall-door bell sounded, accompanied by a brisk knock ing.

‘Well, here we are!’ A tall man smiled and bowed when Florian opened the door. A woman, brightly dressed, was there also.

‘Here indeed!’ she exclaimed. ‘And poor Mr Kilderry doesn’t know us from Adam!’

They didn’t give a name but Florian remembered seeing their black shooting-brake drawn up a few weeks ago.

‘I think you came to see the house,’ he said.

‘Oh, better than that,’ the tall man corrected him. ‘We bought it.’

He extended a hand. The woman, whom Florian assumed to be his wife, pressed a wine merchant’s carrier bag on him, saying it contained something refreshing.

‘We wondered if we might snoop about a bit,’ she murmured in a tinkling voice.

‘Of course. I’m sorry I couldn’t place you. A lot of people came.’ Champagne he guessed their gift was. He thanked them, although he didn’t like champagne.

‘What a happy day!’ the woman exclaimed. She smiled at Florian, her manner playful. ‘Do please forgive us for being a bore!’

‘Those gorgeous scenes!’ the man contributed, referring to the unframed watercolours in the drawing-room while he unfolded a typewritten sheet. ‘Unforgettable!’

‘What a very happy day!’ his wife continued to enthuse, and Florian wondered if she was drunk.

He left them to look about as they wished and to take measurements. He didn’t return to the Fieldbook he’d found but went on throwing anything that would burn on to his fire and anything that wouldn’t into the skip. He came across his father’s binoculars, which had been lost also, and an umbrella someone had left behind and never come back for. He found the key that wound the clock in the hall but hadn’t done so for years. He found the beads of a necklace in a matchbox.

The afternoon he’d hidden the Fieldbook under the fish baskets he had come down the back stairs with it in his hand, not taking it to his bedroom because there wasn’t time, since Isabella would miss her train if everyone didn’t hurry. The door of the poky room that was then a pantry was open. All that came clearly back again, as if it had never not been there.

He had appropriated the Fieldbook in the first place when it fell out of a stack of National Geographic magazines in the garage. He hadn’t been interested in the wildlife details but the faintly lined pages attracted him as much as the leather cover did and in time he found a use for them. Isabella, who often poked about among his possessions, was surprised by what she found written there. ‘Bizzarro!’ her comment was.

The women passed by Miss Dunlop on their way to the kitchen, both of them smirking a little. The Wing Commander moved close to Miss Dunlop and whispered in her ear some words of love. Miss Dunlop blushed, for the Wing Commander had put his earthy desires regarding Mrs Meade into words. He imagined it was Mrs Meade’s ear he spoke into, and he imagined biting the lobe of the countrywoman’s ear and feeling her coarse hair on his cheek.

‘It’s all very well,’ Miss Dunlop protested, sensing at last that something was amiss. She found a cigarette in the pocket of her suit and lit it.

‘How much you are the world to me!’ the Wing Commander murmured, reaching for her again.

No one else except Isabella had ever known about the writing in the Fieldbook, or even that the Fieldbook still existed. Nor did Florian himself regard his fragments of composition as anything more than the fruits of idleness. Nothing was complete, bits of people, bits of occurrences, and he noticed now that the writing was in places uncertain, his adolescent creations often verging on the affected. Madame Rochas, an old schoolteacher, was ‘haunted by footsteps ceaseless in the night’. Yu Zhang was so delighted by Circus of Horrors that he could not pass a cinema where it was showing without seeing it yet again. The Sunday visitors of Anna Andreyev spoke of St Petersburg and Lermontov. Emmanuel Quin was no more than a name, as Johnny Adelaide was, and Vidler. The Reverend Unmack stole from counters and did not know himself.

‘Mr Kilderry!’

Florian went upstairs.

‘Your hot press,’ the tall man said.

‘The hot press?’

‘It seems a trifle damp.’

‘Well, yes, it is.’

‘A leak? We wondered.’

‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry about it.’

‘My dear fellow!’

Florian smiled and nodded, and went away. ‘What’d he have to say for himself?’ he heard the woman ask when he was on his way downstairs. ‘Couldn’t care less,’ the man reported.

They stayed all afternoon, but did not again enquire about the defects they came across. Eventually they called out to say they’d finished and were effusive in their gratitude as they said goodbye. Then they drove off in their big black shooting-brake and Florian returned to the pages of the Fieldbook. Most of what he read he had forgotten writing.

On Madole’s wasteland Willie John and Nason didn’t notice the boy at first. Then Willie John did.

‘What’s the kid want?’ he asked.

‘Only to watch,’ Nason said.

The Sky Wasp spluttered and glided back to them, the engine dead because the lighter fuel had run out.

‘We could charge the kid for watching.’ Willie John laughed, his big jaw split, the freckles around his eyes merging as the flesh puckered. He was red-haired and ungainly. Nason was thin and small, with a lick of black hair trailing over his forehead, his clothes always tidy. He was the younger by a few months.

‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Nason said. ‘The kid’s over at the gravel pits. He’s run off from the travelling people. There’s underground places at the pits. That kid’s grubbing for food with the rabbits.’

Florian hadn’t liked Isabella reading his jottings. But she had, and wanted to know who the people were and where they had come from, why sentences and words often broke off unfinished when sometimes half a page was filled.

At Euston station Michael decided that this was best: to ask straight out and be told, anything rather than the absurdity of making a journey that was unnecessary.

‘Clione?’ he said when the ringing tone ceased and his sister’s voice came on.

‘You’ll come, Michael? All the time he asks.’

But what on earth good would it do? Either way, what good? The long overnight haul and arriving in the early morning at the dreary railway station with his pyjamas and razor in a carrier bag because he didn’t possess a suitcase. And turning into the driveway. He hated turning into the driveway most of all.

‘He’s dying now,’ his sister said.

But at Euston station people were waiting to use the phone. Michael put the receiver down.

Isabella insisted that Florian abandoned too much too easily, often flippantly. In their disagreement about that, she was cool and unflurried, Florian impatient and at a disadvantage because he was flattered that she minded so much. She quoted back to him with admiration what he had written. About cities he had never been to, misfortunes he hadn’t experienced. About rejection and despair. About Olivia, searching London for a man she loved, who stole from her.

He might have gone to Spain. He’d gone to Spain before without a word. Someone he knew had a house in Spain, or rented a house there, she wasn’t sure which. On the other hand, now and again he left London in order to stay with people in different parts of the country. ‘Hasn’t been in,’ the barman in the George said. Olivia asked other drinkers there and they said they hadn’t seen him. She reassured them because of course it would be all right. It would be Spain and he’d be back. He wasn’t in the Coach and Four. He wasn’t in the Queen and Knave.

A girl suggested the Zinzara Club and they went there with a lanky woman the girl knew, and a man with a bow tie. Derek was on the door tonight, his hair done in a different way, and when Olivia asked the woman behind the bar she shook her head and Olivia went to the Grape and he was there, standing where he’d been standing the night she first saw him. He was with people she didn’t know, as he’d been then. She saw him seeing her, but he didn’t move and then the people he was with stared at her and no one spoke.

Surely, Isabella urged, he could make something of that, since he had made a little of it already? ‘Oh, please, why not?’ she begged, determinedly, repeatedly. ‘Oh, please.’

He knew he couldn’t.

While Jessie scurried among the reeds Florian smoked and watched the night beginning. He wished Isabella could know the huntsman’s book hadn’t been thrown away and now was resurrected. He wished she could be here as so often she had been, by the lake, the dark creeping on, more secrecy pretended than was necessary. He wondered if she had married Signor Canepaci or someone else; he wondered if she was happy. He had exasperated her, not being able to tell her who Olivia was, or who Miss Dunlop was, or any of the others. ‘Did they come to the parties?’ she asked. Were Nason and Willie John boys at school? Was Madole’s wasteland somewhere they could go?

Florian did not try to sleep that night. He didn’t go to bed and in his silent house what he had been separated from for so long seemed tonight more than he had written down. Miss Dunlop’s blouse was pink, a touch of henna transformed her hair. The pale, stretched features of Yu Zhang lost their solemnity in a smile. The Wing Commander had experienced gaol. An injury, not yet healed, was vivid on the forehead of the boy at the gravel pits. The old teacher’s nightly footsteps were the footsteps of a child whose fate she dared not think about. Life wasn’t worth living, Olivia whispered.

Reading and rereading the scraps he had given up on, Florian did not readily conclude that time, in passing, had brought perception, only that his curiosity was stirred by the shadows and half-shadows imagination had once given him, by the unspoken, and what was still unknown. He added nothing to what was written, only murmuring occasionally a line or word that might supply an emphasis or clarify a passage.

But in the early morning, standing at the water’s edge while in vain he scanned the sky for the bird that no longer came, he felt exhilarated, as if something had happened to him that he didn’t entirely know about, or know about at all. This feeling was still there when he returned to the house, while he made coffee and toasted bread, and gave his dog her food. It was there when, later in the morning, he lay down to sleep. He slept all day, and woke to it.

21

Ellie had not been to the gate-lodge since before the day they had climbed up to the corrie lakes at Gortalassa. It was a busy time of year, made more so by helping at the Corrigans’ harvest: it wasn’t as easy as it had been to get away.

Her low spirits at Gortalassa had not revived, although they did a little when, behind the loose stone in the wall at the ruins, she found a note that gave directions of how to get to Shelhanagh House. Come any day you can. Come any time, the message was, on the back of a map, in handwriting she had not known before. The ease with which all this happened - the note written, the directions given, the map drawn, his wanting her to come to the house he talked so much about - gave Ellie more than hope, restoring something at least of what had been taken from her on the slopes of Gortalassa. It had not before been suggested that she should make the journey he suggested now, and she wondered if it could be that for some reason everything was suddenly different. That the sale of the house had fallen through. That the people buying it had made a mistake or, when they calculated, didn’t have the money. Months, maybe a year, might pass while the unsold house kept him in Ireland. She had thought she might never hear from him again. But she had and he wanted her to come to him.

Thursday I’ll come. The afternoon is better.

She left her note where his had been.

To arrange the loan with which he hoped to buy Gahagan’s field Dillahan made one of his rare weekday visits to Rathmoye. In Mr Hassett’s small private office he presented the facts and Mr Hassett said he didn’t think two thousand pounds was going to break the bank. Beneath his small moustache he fleetingly displayed the smile familiar to borrowers when he agreed to make a loan. Dillahan nodded his gratitude.

‘A pity to pass it by,’ he said.

‘It’s always a pity to pass good land by, Mr Dillahan.’

‘The trouble is, one day he’d be on about offers for it, the next he’d be talking about clearing and draining.’

‘He’s neglected it, has he?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘The older a man is the harder it is for him to part with what he has. And the more reason he should. Not that selling out isn’t hard on any man, never mind his years.’

‘Gahagan has a fair bit left, all the same.’

Dillahan stood up. There was a golf cup on the desk and Mr Hassett saw him looking at it. A bit of luck, he said, the Rathmoye Bankers’ Prize. He held the door of his small private office open. The two men shook hands and Dillahan passed through the main offices, out into the sunshine of the Square. He looked to see if Ellie had come back from her shopping. One of the back doors of the Vauxhall was open, a basket and two bags still on the ground beside where she stood. The mad old Protestant was talking to her.

‘They went because of it,’ Orpen Wren said. ‘The St Johns didn’t have control over their sons.’

Ellie nodded. She read her list again, making sure she’d got everything.

‘The last steward they had at Lisquin was Mr Boyle and the mistress had himself and myself brought to her little room. “Close the door,” she said, and I did and Mr Boyle didn’t say a word. Men coming to the house looking for their women, she said. Wives or daughters, it never mattered. The Rakes of Mallow weren’t in it, she said. “Oh, worse,” she said. “Worse than that any day.”

‘The master had taken to his bed for the shame of it, and she came out with it then: that Elador was gone off with a woman. “All I know is the running of the house,” she said. “I can’t be devising stratagems.” Her two little girls were a few years old and Jack maybe fourteen. What good was she for more besides that, was what she was asking us, and Mr Boyle said he’d scour all Ireland. He’d take a stableman with him and they’d go into every inn and hotel. They’d search the two of them out if it took them a six-month. He wouldn’t spare Elador, he promised her that. He’d have it clear and plain with Elador that he must give the woman back where she belonged. Mr Boyle said to the mistress, “Ma’am, I’d maybe have to thrash it out of Elador.” He said he’d need her permission for laying hands on her boy, and the master’s permission, because he’d be frightened of the law. She said it again that her husband was in his bed. She was beside herself, she didn’t remember telling us before. “Mr Wren will write it down,” Mr Boyle said. “Mr Wren will write it down that Elador came back chastened to Lisquin. Mr Wren will put the date to it. And write it down that permission was given.”’

Ellie tried to detect from her husband’s gait if he’d been allowed the loan, but she couldn’t tell. A shawled woman held out a hand and when he’d reached into his pockets he dropped a coin into it.

‘Her heart was broken for Lisquin, Mr Boyle said. Her heart was broken for the St Johns brought low by a son. “It’s in this family always,” she said, and there were tears on her face. For a long time already it was in the family, she said, one generation to the next. “Let me go, ma’am,” Mr Boyle begged her. “Let the stableman and myself make an end of the unworthiness of the whole thing.” If afterwards the story would be told, Mr Boyle said, if afterwards the children of the St Johns would hear before they became men of how Elador St John had been thrashed in Letterkenny or Arklow or by the roadside in County Clare, how he and his woman were hunted down like two wild creatures by dogs - if the children would be told the story, that would be an end to it for ever. And when himself and the stableman went they found the two in Portumna by the river, in lodgings where spalpeens would stay, or labouring men on the repair of a road. They gave the woman back to her husband, and Elador St John was sent out of Ireland. But one night, when years again had passed, a farmer came to Lisquin with a gun, which was taken off him or he’d have shot Jack dead. The day following there was no one in the household that didn’t know the St Johns would go.’

His eyes had become steely and intense. One hand gripped the top of the car’s open door. All during his long monologue Ellie had had the impression that he was trying to say something else and couldn’t manage to because he couldn’t find the words. He asked her if she understood.

‘Lisquin’s gone this long time, Mr Wren,’ she said. ‘The St Johns with it.’

‘“We know old trouble, sir,” I said to George Anthony the first day he was back with us. It was the trouble brought the family down, lady, only that wouldn’t be said unless it was within the walls of Lisquin. That’s how it is to this time, lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘The papers are back where they belong. He was good to take them from me. An old ghost, they’d say, if they saw me coming with them myself. I wouldn’t presume to be welcome in the house. George Anthony saw me right.’

‘Who you’re talking about isn’t a St John, Mr Wren.’

‘There’s your husband coming now, lady. I know your husband well.’

Dillahan waited for a car to pass before he began to cross the Square and then was delayed by Fennerty the cattle auctioneer, who told him Con Hannington was dead. ‘Last evening,’ he said.

‘I heard.’

They talked for a few minutes. Poor Con had been shook a long time, Fennerty said, and Dillahan kept nodding, trying to edge away. He didn’t like coming in to Rathmoye because he still sensed the pity of people, and since he continued to blame himself for the accident it came naturally to him to assume that in spite of their sympathy others blamed him too. On Sundays he went to early Mass because it was less crowded.

He said he’d see Fennerty around. When he reached the Vauxhall Ellie was alone again.

‘That’s fixed,’ he said. ‘Have you everything?’

‘I have.’

‘We’ll be off so.’

He eased the Vauxhall through the other cars in the Square and drove across Magennis Street into Cashel Street.

‘What’d the old fellow want?’

‘Only rambling on,’ Ellie said, ‘you wouldn’t know what he was at.’

‘It can’t be much of a joke, your memory turned inside out for you.’ He stopped for a woman and a pram at a crossing. ‘Poor old devil.’

‘Yes.’

They passed the two churches, then left the town behind. They waited at temporary traffic lights where the road was up.

‘Who’s that?’ Dillahan asked when they passed a cyclist.

She wanted to say it was Florian Kilderry and that she was in love with him. She wanted to say the name, to say he was on the road because he was going to the back gate-lodge of Lisquin House, where often they were together. She wanted to say he would find a note from her, that he would have come for that.

‘I don’t know who he is,’ she heard herself saying, and again there was the urge to talk about him. She’d seen him about before, she said. Florian Kilderry she’d heard him called. Near Castledrummond he came from.

The lights changed. They waited for a lorry coming slowly. Dillahan said there used to be a County Council foreman called Kilderry, two fingers gone from his right hand. He said his father once bought a scarifier at a bankrupt sale in Castledrummond.

‘I remember coming back from school and it was in the yard.’ He had never been in Castledrummond himself.

‘No.’

‘It was busy today, was it?’

‘It was, for a Tuesday.’

‘I see there’s posters up, some old circus coming.’

‘They’ve been up a while.’

‘Not Duffy’s, though?’

‘No, not Duffy’s.’

‘I used be taken to Duffy’s.’

He had told her about that when first she came to the farm, how he’d always been impatient, waiting for the elephants to come on, and how a clown had persuaded one of his sisters to give him a kiss. He had told her about Piper’s Entertainments when they’d come to Rathmoye, the roundabouts and bumper cars, the hoopla stall where he’d won a china rabbit.

‘Con Hannington’s funeral’s Friday,’ he said. He drew out to turn to the right, and waited for a tractor to go by. He saluted the man on it.

‘Con lent me fifty pounds one time,’ he said. ‘The barley failed and I was pushed.’

He would have paid the money back, every penny, and Con Hannington would have known he would. The bank wasn’t taking a chance with the loan and the bank would know that too.

‘I’ll go to the funeral,’ he said.

She hadn’t often left a note, always managing to come herself, always wanting to. He’d be there by now and he’d maybe wait a while, then he’d lift out the stone. He hadn’t realized whose car it was when it went by. He didn’t know the car.

They passed Gahagan’s gate, beside the old milk-churn platform that was falling to bits, then the turn-off to the boreen that was the way up to the hills, difficult in winter when a flood came down it.

They had to back for the post van, and the new young postman wound his window down and handed out the bill for the fertilizer that had been delivered a few weeks ago.

‘A decent lad, that,’ her husband said.

The dogs heard the car’s approach and began to bark when it was still far off. As well she’d looked behind the stone; as well he’d come to look there today. A Golden Eagle his bicycle was called, a picture of an eagle on a rock below the handlebars. She’d never known a bicycle called that before.

‘There’s the last of the potatoes to lift,’ her husband said, ‘before we’d get the rain. Only a dozen or so rows.’

‘I’ll help you so.’

‘Arrah, no, you have enough to do.’

‘I never mind.’

‘Ah, well, no.’ He protested softly, shaking his head as he often did when she offered to do what he considered she no longer should.

He turned the car into the yard. The dogs came to greet them.

22

Shelhanagh House was not as Ellie had imagined it. A white hall door was tinged with watery green, the paint worn away in places. On the gravel an iron container was beginning to overflow, heaped with tattered suitcases gnawed by mice, rusty paint tins, an ironing-board, weighing-scales, a typewriter, electric fires, a fender, a press for trousers. The flagstones in the hall weren’t covered, the dining-room contained no furniture, the drawing-room was not a drawing-room.

‘I should have warned you,’ he said.

He led the way upstairs, past empty rooms, to what he called the high attics, to a narrow stairway that then became a ladder to the lofts and the roof. They stood on the warm lead of a gully between two slated inclines, looking down at the garden and, beyond it, to the lake Ellie had been told about, over farmland to the distant mountains. A tractor moved slowly up and down a field, soundless where they stood.

‘I always liked it up here,’ he said and he pointed places out and gave them names - Greenane Crossroads, a bridge a little further off, on the way to Castledrummond, and farms and houses. ‘I used to read here. For hours, you know, in summer.’

‘It’s lovely. Everywhere.’

A dog followed them when they were downstairs again.

‘Jessie she’s called,’ he said, and in the kitchen picked up a book from the table. A long time ago he’d lost it and found it only the other day. He hated losing things, he said.

‘Is the house still being sold?’ Ellie asked, reaching down to stroke the dog’s head when they were in a cobbled yard.

‘Poor old Jessie’s getting on a bit,’ he said. ‘Yes, Shelhanagh is sold.’

If the sale fell through she had promised herself to make her confession. She had promised atonement, and obedience; that she would, for all her life, in every hour of every day, be ordered by obedience.

‘The seventeenth of next month,’ he said.

Ages, he’d said before, since there were so many formalities. October perhaps, and she had imagined the bare trees of autumn, the mists of November gathering while he still was here. September the seventeenth was less than three weeks away.

‘The same afternoon I found that book the people who’ve bought Shelhanagh came. An excitable pair,’ he said.

‘I thought maybe something might go wrong.’

‘No, nothing did.’

In the yard the rickety doors of a garage had to be lifted up when they were being pulled open. It was a long time since this car had been on a road, he said. He called the motor car a Morris Cowley and opened at the back what he called a dicky seat.

In the garden he pointed at long grass shimmering in the sunlight, swaying a little because a breeze had got up.

‘That’s where the tennis court was.’

He’d had a tutor for a while, he said, who played tennis in his ordinary shoes. His father considered that wasn’t the thing at all. Even with his limp, his father had always won at tennis.

Every summer the man who used to shoot the rabbits took away the dead ones, but others came. In the rhododendron shrubbery there was a secret place and a rabbit would sometimes run out of it as if, for rabbits, it was a secret place too.

‘I had imaginary friends there and once pretended that the rabbit man shot one of them by mistake. I had a funeral, with wreaths of rhododendron.’

Wisps of smoke blew about. In cardboard boxes beside a heap of smouldering ashes separate bundles of papers were held together by rubber bands, and there were cheque-book stubs and letters in their envelopes, and receipts on spikes. Ellie watched a blaze beginning and remembered the letter she’d written to Sister Ambrose, which she had burnt in the Rayburn. Longer ago than three weeks that was, months more like. Three weeks was nothing.

He threw more paper on to the fire, and then the boxes themselves. He pointed at the roof of the house, a different part of it from where they had stood: people who’d come to a party had climbed up there and one of them sang a song there, a man who sang in operas.

‘Is it definite?’ she asked. ‘September the seventeenth?’

‘Yes, it’s definite.’

Wild sweet pea was in bloom, white and faded shades of mauve and pink. Apples were forming on the trees they passed among on their way to the lake. At its edge, water rats scuttled into the water when the dog came snuffling through the reeds.

‘A Thursday,’ she said. ‘The seventeenth of September.’

There was a dullness in her voice. He heard it and wished she was not here, although he wanted her to be. Being here made everything worse for her: he could tell, and knew she couldn’t because she didn’t want to. He hadn’t known himself when he’d suggested that she should come.

‘There wasn’t any other way,’ he said. ‘It had to be sold. I didn’t realize things would go so smoothly.’

Almost everything sounded wrong as soon as he said it and for a moment he felt that he belonged in his own created world of predators, that he was himself a variation of their cruelty. He had taken what there was to take, had exorcized, again, his nagging ghost. And doing so, in spite of tenderness, in spite of affection for a girl he hardly knew, he had made a hell for her.

She watched him rooting for a cigarette and finding one loose in a pocket. She watched him straightening it, packing the shreds of tobacco in. Then they went back the way they had come, through the apple trees. In the garden he threw a ball for his dog. In the kitchen he showed her a faded postcard that had been propped up on a windowsill. A woman in old-fashioned clothes had a quill in one hand and what might have been a saucer in the other. A monk was praying.

‘St Lucy,’ he said.

The handle of a dagger and part of its blade protruded from the saint’s neck. There was no blood. She had a halo.

‘You have a look of this St Lucy,’ he said.

She shook her head. She hadn’t known there was a St Lucy, and that there ever had been did not come into things now. ‘Come with me,’ she had made him say, knowing that it was fantasy. ‘Come with me,’ and he talked to her then about Scandinavia, as now he did about his childhood past. And she stole away from the farmhouse, closing the door on the quietened kitchen, the unlaid table, no saucepans simmering on the stove. People would hear that she wasn’t there, the Corrigans and Gahagan, the shop people in Rathmoye, Mrs Hadden, Miss Connulty, the priests, the Cloonhill nuns. It frightened her to hear herself reviled, but when she heard it often it might not any more.

He took the postcard from her and put it back on the windowsill.

‘I’m sorry there’s no cake.’ He poured the tea he’d made. He had remembered jam - raspberry from the half-and-half, he explained. He said the bread was fresh.

‘I don’t need anything,’ she said, but she ate the bread he’d cut because he’d cut it, and drank the tea he’d poured. And afterwards, in the drawing-room, he told her how the room had been, describing the furniture that was no longer there. He prised out the drawing-pins that held in place a row of pictures on a wall. Each time smoothing the wrinkled paper, he handed one and then another to her.

‘Their watercolours are what’s left of my mother and my father,’ he said.

He said he had known the name of the strand where people were having a picnic, but had forgotten it. The couple who conversed in an empty theatre were actors who’d been famous in their day. It was at the corner of a Dublin street that the three-card trick was played on an umbrella, the tulip tree was in a Dublin garden. ‘She used to come here,’ he said about a girl in an ivory-white dress who was stretched out on the upturned boat by the lake, her long legs languidly spread, a red scarf knotted at her throat.

‘Have them,’ he said. ‘Please have them.’

She shook her head. To accept what she was offered was to say that she would stay and he would go, that the giving and the taking were the gesture of parting, and parting’s confirmation. As once she would not have, she knew to say no.

She was not pressed and soon afterwards she rode back to Rathmoye. She had meat to get in Hearn’s, and a few groceries in the Cash and Carry. Then she looked up Scandinavia in Hogan’s, where she had once bought a new exercise-book for the accounts. School books were kept too, and she found Scandinavia in an atlas. When she saw its shape, one side of it jagged, she remembered the glossy map draped over the blackboard. A book she took from the shelves said that Norway’s fjords probed deeply inland, that forest and water and coastal archipelagos gave Sweden its brooding nature. ‘Denmark’s the little one,’ she remembered the geography nun saying, and she remembered the mermaid on the rock.

Different languages, not many cities, the book said. Corn was grown. Iron ore was mined at Kiruna. Place names were unpronounceable. Gudbrandsdalen, Ellie read, Henne Strand, Sundsfjord, Kittelfjäll. But easier to say, there were Gothenburg and Malmö too, Leksand, Finse.

The Vikings were of Scandinavia. Neatly in chalk on the blackboard, that came back to her. Sister Agnes the geography nun had been.

23

Orpen Wren went about the shops. He waited at the railway station. He sat down in the Square, trying to remember who it was he had to see, who it was he had to pass on a message to. The Rakes of Mallow: that came back to him, that being said in the library, but he didn’t know why it came back now. ‘The Rakes of Mallow aren’t in it.’ Her voice faltered when she said it, as any mother’s voice would, and then she cried. Was her son dead in Portumna? she asked Mr Boyle and Mr Boyle said only lamed and she said thank God. The coachman the whole time was silent.

Twilight, then darkness, spread through what Orpen Wren recalled: a thickening fog, sound and faces distorted, then lost. It would lift, today some time, tomorrow. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

The papers were back. The woman had arranged for the coal delivery. The first fires would be lit, you’d hear the pianos played. You’d hear the horses whinnying in the yard, you’d hear the dogs, you’d hear the voices. ‘We’ll go,’ the master said from his bed.

Thomas John Kinsella, was the memorial inscription on the pedestal. Died for Ireland, 1776-1798. There was more, the letters small, incised; but the name and the dates were enough. Orpen looked up at the young, bony features, the open shirt and bare forearms, and felt sorry for the hero who had died so early in his life. He often said he was sorry when he sat here in the Square, enjoying the company. He was fond of Thomas Kinsella.

He went again to the railway station. He bought a tin of soup in the corner shop in Hurley Lane. He watched the children at hopscotch.

Thomas John Kinsella, he read again when he returned to the Square. He slept for a while and when he woke it was because he was wagging his head, reproving himself for having forgotten what he now remembered: whom it was he had to see and give a message to.

He set off at once, but after a while the distance seemed too far and he knew he’d have to wait for a better day.

24

Dillahan dismantled the corral he erected every year for the shearing. As always at this busy time, he had put off the dismantling for longer than he’d intended. Weeks had passed and every day he’d told himself that the sprawl of old gates and corrugated iron was unsightly, the garish red binding twine, the swirls of wool scattered.

Ellie gathered the lengths of twine when they were released, pulling apart the knots in them. She raked up the wool, combing it out of the grass. She had brought the fertilizer bag from last year to take it away in.

‘Better we’d get it done early next time,’ her husband said while he stacked the rusting gates on the trailer.

There was withering all around them: of the nettles that had earlier been verdant in the hedges, of drooping foxgloves and cow-parsley. Hard, dry earth was exposed where sheep had congregated, grass was yellowing. But the September air was cool and fresh, pleasanter than August’s brashness.

Ellie hardly noticed all this, but knew from other years that it was there. She tried to think of that, of the first time she had raked up the wool, and getting to know this field; of the first time she’d collected the eggs in the crab-apple orchard, and seeing the hares at night. But Shelhanagh House kept breaking into what she imposed - its shabby, deserted rooms, the tennis court, the quiet old dog resting on the grass, the postcard of St Lucy. And Scandinavia broke in too; and she was there, in its strangeness.

‘Well, it kept fine for us still,’ her husband said. ‘I don’t know did we ever have a dryness like it. Good girl,’ he complimented her, a note of sympathy in his tone, for her task was tedious.

He started the tractor and she heard the clatter of the trailer’s load until it began to fade and then was gone. She tied the lengths of binding twine into a bundle and put it to one side. She filled the fertilizer bag with the pile of wool she’d made. She was all morning in the field.

The small churchyard was shadowy with a twilight of its own, overhung with maple trees and oaks, its dark yews like sentinels among them, old headstones crooked or fallen. How random the chance of circumstance was, Florian reflected, surveying the grass that had grown high on the mound that was his parents’ grave. How much of chance it was that Natalia Verdecchia, a child of Genoa, should be here now because she had loved a soldato di ventura . The two names were sharply incised on unpolished limestone, the letterer who had been commissioned chosen for the sensitivity of his touch. All that had mattered - that they should be together, that skill and quality should mark their place in a graveyard, as their devotion to one another and the gift they’d shared had marked their lives. It wasn’t easy to believe that they lay in silence, together yet out of touch.

A man was working with a hoe on the gravel paths and Florian borrowed a pair of shears from him. He cut the grass on the grave, pulled out brambles that hadn’t yet established themselves. The day before he died his father had apologized for what might have seemed to be shared also: disappointment in an only child. He was insistent that there had never been that, and Florian had pretended too.

He returned the shears, and wandered among the graves before he went back to the one he’d tidied. How well they had loved! he reflected, tracing with a finger the two names on the gravestone. How well they had known how to live, how little they’d been a nuisance in other people’s lives. He hoped it would be difficult to forget Ellie Dillahan, that at least there would be that.

He had left his bicycle at the lich-gate. The chain had begun to slip and he took it to be tightened, since he intended to cycle all the way to Dublin when he left. All night it would take if he set out in the evening. ‘Never leave your bicycle on a street in Dublin,’ his father used to say, but he would do that, leaving it for anyone.

He called in at the offic e of the solicitors who had drawn up the conveyance for the sale of Shelhangh House. He requested that what money was owed to him after the numerous deductions were made should be lodged with the Castledrummond branch of the Bank of Ireland. He made arrangements at the bank regarding the availability to him of such funds as soon as he was abroad. He bought a bicycle lamp; he hadn’t possessed one before.

Ellie picked out clothes and put them ready, folded, in one side of a drawer. She bought in food: tins so that there would be something in the house, Three Counties cheese, a cut of bacon that would keep. It was only right that there should be food enough for a while, and a store of tins was always useful anyway.

The zip of the red holdall she had taken to Lahinch years ago was jammed and she couldn’t free it. She had bought it in the second-hand shop and that the zip kept sticking hadn’t mattered then, but it mattered now and she looked in Corbally’s to see what was on offer. She didn’t buy anything, knowing she could come back for one of the holdalls she was shown. She would get in a few more tins when that time came, and vegetables that would keep for a while. She would put out rashers and put out eggs so that there’d be something easy for him at first. She was not unaware that in doing so she was anticipating too much, that what had begun as fantasy was every day acquiring a little more of reality. She tried to prevent herself from allowing this, but couldn’t.

25

The waitress at Olery was talkative. She stood with the checked cloth she always carried with her for wiping the tables. You wouldn’t know where the time went to, she said. Since Easter she’d been at the tearooms and you wouldn’t credit the days going by. A few weeks and she’d be starting her winter job, back in Dublin, where she came from. The Log Cabin, Phibsborough: Leitrim Street, she’d done a winter there before.

‘If ever you’d be passing,’ she invited.

Florian nodded. He had smiled now and then while listening to what they were being told. Ellie was quiet, in a navy-blue anorak he hadn’t seen before.

‘I’ll bring your teas,’ the waitress said, and added that she was a Phibsborough girl herself. ‘I got to know you these past few months,’ she said before she went away.

Theirs was the only table occupied in the tearooms. Outside a man with an electric hedge-trimmer was clipping the maze, the fle x trailing behind him. They’d noticed as they passed it, a sign saying that the maze was closed today. They could hear the hum of the trimmer from where they were.

Two elderly women came in, continuing a conversation. Florian watched them while they sat down, and while they changed their minds and went to another table, giggling a bit.

‘But, Ellie,’ he began to say, reverting to what had been interrupted by the waitress talking about herself. ‘Ellie -’

‘I would go with you. To anywhere.’

The pleasant sound of quietened laughter came from the table where the two women, amusing one another, conversed again. Their tea, a lot of it, was spread out on a paper tablecloth and the waitress with her empty tray flat beneath one arm answered questions about what the scones and iced cakes contained, for it seemed that there were diets to consider.

Florian listened, reluctant to engage in what was being pressed upon him. Alone in the newness of somewhere, he knew now he would exploit imagination’s ragged bits and pieces, tease order out of formless nothings, begin again and then again: how could he say it? That in some small quiet town he would take a room and work, and safely from afar try not to love, for ever, Isabella? How could he say a single word of such confessing when instead he could make a decent lie of the unpitying, unforgiving truth: would it have cost too much to say, or ever to have said, ‘I love you’?

The waitress came again and, surmising something in the silence as she approached, only wrote out her bill and left it on the table.

‘We’ve had our summer, Ellie.’

He said it softly, as gently as he could, rejecting falsity, for time would contradict it, add injury to injury, and pain to pain, and shame to shame. Time’s searching wisdom would punish both of them, and punish ruthlessly.

They began to go. At the door more people were coming in and they stood back to let them pass.

‘Without you there is nothing,’ Ellie said.

The man was taking down the sign about the maze being closed, his long electric flex coiled up. He nodded to them, knowing them as the waitress did.

Clumps of rush had begun to grow and Dillahan knew that the ground in this corner was waterlogged. Broken or clogged land-drains, it would be, more likely broken. He advanced a yard or so further and was in a marsh. But that was all that was wrong with Gahagan’s field, except for the fencing and general neglect, and he had suspected trouble in this corner. He could guess where the drain ran, a single pipe he imagined: he’d be able to dig it out himself. He’d done well out of the purchase, and he knew he had.

He walked around the boundary, rabbit-burrowing everywhere, the worst year for rabbits he’d ever known. He would replace the old wooden gate with an iron one, and the trough while he was at it. There was a dead elm in the road hedge and he was sizing it up, wondering if he could fell it himself, when he heard a bicycle beyond the bend and then Ellie went by. He thought she’d see him there, but she didn’t. He called after her, wanting to show her the marshy corner, but she rode on, not hearing him.

26

No note invited her again to Shelhanagh House. He did not come when she waited at the gate-lodge ruins, where in the beginning so many times he had waited himself. The piece of iron with which he’d dug the ivy out was still on the grass where he had left it.

Ellie went away, returned later that same day. Had he gone already, the formalities completed sooner than the date? Was he there now, in Henne Strand or Finse or Malmö? Was his house already made different with other people’s furniture?

Again she left the gate-lodge ruins, again returned.

Jessie wasn’t there, waking up in the open doorway when Florian did. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and he looked for her in the garden and then walked to the lake, calling her. He was still in his pyjamas, which had become sodden where they trailed through the long grass. He searched the garden again, and then went back to the house, to the sculleries and the unused dining-room, the drawing-room, and what had once been his darkroom. In one of the empty attics, huddled into a corner, she tried to wag her tail at him.

‘Poor Jess,’ he murmured.

He warmed milk in the kitchen and took it back to her but she didn’t want it. He cradled her in his arms but she struggled slightly and kept slipping away. He put her down in the place she’d chosen and crouched beside her.

‘Poor Jess,’ he said again, and she made another effort to move her tail, to thump the floor the way she knew she should. An eye regarded him, demanded nothing, trusting features that had always been trusted. Her tongue lolled tiredly out. She tried to pant. A few minutes later she died.

He dug her grave in a corner where she used to lie when the sun was too hot, or in spring, watching for rabbits. She had been fetched from somewhere a couple of miles away, the last one in a litter. His father had walked there, returning with the small bundle in his arms. ‘Peko,’ his father had suggested. ‘Jessie,’ his mother said.

Florian carried her downstairs, through the kitchen to the garden. He sat on the grass, his arms around her, her body stiffening, still warm. Then he buried her.

Afterwards, in the house, he sensed an eeriness, as if it had been waiting for this particular departure, another in an exodus that was now almost complete. He found it hard to settle and walked to Greenane Crossroads to leave the key of the hall door with Mrs Carley a day early.

‘They’ll find the others in an empty polish tin in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘If you could tell them I’ll leave that tin in one of the cupboards.’

‘I will of course.’

‘Jessie died this morning.’

‘Ah, the dear help poor Jessie!’

‘I was going to ask you if you’d have her. For the bit of time left to her.’

‘Of course I would have. Of course.’

‘Otherwise -’

‘I know, I know.’

They were in the licensed half of the premises and Mrs Carley, on hearing the news, had at once poured Florian a glass of whiskey.

‘You couldn’t but like that dog,’ she said, replacing the bottle on the shelf. ‘Nor the Kilderrys either. We’ll miss the style of the Kilderrys hereabouts.’

Mrs Carley’s plump presence, full of goodwill and fondness for the human race, hadn’t changed in the years Florian had known her. She’d been the last of the maids at Shelhanagh before she married into the half-and-half, and it had never been a source of resentment that her wages were often delayed until another picture was sold. She came back later to preside over tea after both funerals - a huge spread supplied by herself, for a small gathering on each occasion.

Florian stayed, talking about the snow that came unexpectedly and lay on the ground for so long in the winter of nineteen forty-six, about being spared the war, about times he hardly remembered.

‘You’ll be all right, will you?’ Suddenly, almost sharply, there was concern in Mrs Carley’s easygoing tone.

‘I will. Of course I will.’

‘You’re young to go wandering all the same.’

The talk changed again, slipping back into the past, which was Mrs Carley’s favourite conversational period. She had been remembered as Nellie at Shelhanagh, but her time there had for the most part been before Florian’s and he considered the formality of her married name to be her due: he had always called her Mrs Carley.

‘They’ll pull it together again,’ he said, referring to the couple who had bought the house.

Someone came into the grocery as he was speaking and Mrs Carley held her hand out, across the counter.

‘God bless,’ she said.

Ellie waited when she had pulled the bell-chain a couple of times, then she went in. The hall door hadn’t been locked when she’d come before and it wasn’t now.

She called out, but she could tell he wasn’t there. She wheeled her bicycle into the yard. The back door, too, was open.

She walked about the house. Upstairs, she found his bed unmade and made it. An empty suitcase was open on the floor, waiting to be packed. His passport was on the mantelpiece.

In the drawing-room the rickety table was gone, but the pictures he had wanted her to have were still in the pile he’d made of them, on the floor now. The book he’d told her about finding was in the kitchen, on the table, but she didn’t open it.

She washed the dishes in the sink, then took a chair out to the yard. His dog must have gone with him, she thought, wondering where that was.

When Florian returned from Greenane he noticed that one of the two remaining chairs was no longer in the kitchen. He couldn’t remember taking it somewhere else and then he saw the washed dishes on the draining-board. From the window he saw Ellie in the yard.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said when he told her Jessie had died.

Thrown up by his digging, a scattering of clay had not yet dried on the grass. A blackbird flew away when they went there.

‘I thought your neighbours’ harvesting . . .’ Florian began to say.

Ellie shook her head. All that was over, she said.

‘I couldn’t not come. I couldn’t.’

‘You’ve been crying, Ellie.’

‘I thought you’d gone. I could see that wasn’t the way of it but even so in the quiet I thought you’d gone.’

‘Well, I haven’t. I’m here.’

And there was still all day, Florian said, and all day tomorrow. He put his arms around her. She said she couldn’t bear to think about tomorrow.

^‘Ellie . . .’

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please. I’ve come to you.’

27

He was tired. He had met no one on the roads for a long time, no one to ask, no signposts because the roads were small. It wasn’t right where he was now. He felt it wasn’t and he asked in a house he came to, a dark, cement house among trees.

‘I know you,’ the child who opened the door greeted him, and he said he had walked out from Rathmoye, that his name was Orpen Wren.

‘Sometimes I’d forget it. When you get old it isn’t easy.’

‘It’s just I saw you a few times,’ the child said. ‘When we’d be Rathmoye I’d see you.’

Orpen asked for directions. He wasn’t going further, he said. He’d go back now to Rathmoye if he could discover the way. It was the third time he’d come looking for the destination he couldn’t find, but he didn’t say that.

‘There’s no one here only me,’ the child said. ‘They’re out at work.’

He had thought the child was a boy, but he saw now she was a girl wearing trousers. Her hair was cut short, but no shorter than many a boy’s. Her eyes were a light shade of blue.

‘Are you not in a car?’ she asked.

‘I never had a car.’

‘It’s a good step in to Rathmoye.’

‘I walked all Ireland once. Am I near Lisquin?’

‘Ah, no, you’re not.’

‘It isn’t Lisquin I’m after. It’s only I know my bearings from Lisquin. It’s a man I came looking for.’

‘Go down the road till you’ll come to a black-tarred gate. Keep on past the gate till you’ll come to a four-crossroads. Go to your left and go right at the sharp corner. You’ll get on to the big road then and Rathmoye’s marked up on the signpost. Will I tell you again?’

Orpen requested that, and then thanked the child. He found the black gate but when he went on he couldn’t remember the rest of the directions and would have been lost again if a woman on a bicycle hadn’t walked with him to the crossroads.

‘Who were you looking for out this way?’ she asked him and said he had strayed by a fair step when he told her.

She drew a map on a piece of brown paper she tore off a parcel. ‘That’s the best way you’ll do it from Rathmoye,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose it now for another day.’

He rested after she left him, sitting on the grass verge. Then he went on, put right again by tinkers on the side of the road.

28

When Ellie woke up she didn’t know where she was, and then remembered. She heard a car. Coming into the room, Florian said:

‘The men to tow away the Morris Cowley.’

She asked him what time it was. He said half past twelve, or nearly.

‘Have they gone, the men?’

‘They’re going now.’

She closed her eyes, not wanting to be awake. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tweed waistcoat unbuttoned. He was looking down at her.

‘Don’t be upset,’ he said.

Sunlight made a pattern with the shadows on the boards of the floor and on her clothes where she had thrown them, her bangle, and the ring she had taken from her finger. Her blue dress was crumpled. One shoe was on its side.

‘I’ll make tea,’ he said.

When he went downstairs she found a bathroom in a part of the house she hadn’t been in before. It was a bathroom that wasn’t used, the small bath chipped and stained, grit fallen into it from the ceiling. But water came when she turned on the single tap at the wash-basin and she bathed her face.

The water was cold. There were no towels. There wasn’t soap. A cloth had hardened into a bundle on the windowsill and she ran water over it, and washed herself.

She didn’t hurry. She didn’t want tea, she wanted to be alone. A pool gathered on the floor while she washed and she tried to soak it up with the cloth.

A nun had gone to a man at the sawmills in Templeross. Sometimes she was called Roseline after the Blessed Roseline, but that was always known to be made up, for the nun was nameless at Cloonhill, mistily there in whispered tales passed down through generations. The man would come delivering logs in winter and she went to him, her habit folded on her bed, her crucifix , her beads, her missal, her shoes left too. All that was said, although it was forbidden to say anything.

Wondering what to dry herself with, Ellie sat on the edge of the bath. In the round, discoloured mirror above the basin there were glimpses of her nakedness when she moved. She never liked not having clothes on and she looked away. She was cold.

A few said the man wasn’t there when the nun went to him, that she searched for him on the streets of cities, that he was never there again. Some said she begged on the streets and was known to have been a nun. Some said that when she was old she was found in the river at Limerick.

The bolt of the door wouldn’t move at first but did when Ellie tried again. She listened and could hear nothing, not footsteps, not voices. Then she heard the car being towed away.

In the bedroom she dried herself on a sheet she pulled off the bed. Éire, Ireland, Irelande, it said on the passport that was displayed as the postcard of the saint was in the kitchen, more gilded letters bright on its green cover: Pas, Passport, Passeport.

She put her ring on again when she was dressed, secured the clasp of her bangle, tidied her hair as best she could with her fingers because her comb was in her handbag in the hall. A pigeon was murmuring outside the open window and then she heard the rattle of the garage doors being closed. She hung the sheet to dry on hooks that were there for a curtain-rail. She pulled the bedclothes off to air the bed. She didn’t want to go downstairs and didn’t go when he called, but when he called again she went.

‘Stay a bit longer,’ Florian said, and the hall-door bell jangled as he spoke.

He poured two cups of tea before he went to answer it. ‘Forgotten something,’ he said.

It was a wrench, put down somewhere when a bolt on the Morris Cowley had had to be tightened. He helped the two men to look for it and found it in the yard by the garage doors.

‘Devil take it,’ the man he returned it to said. ‘That thing could hide itself in your flannel and you wouldn’t know.’

He was carrying the chair she’d taken to the yard when he came back. He said it was a tool they had left behind.

Better just to go, she thought, but still she didn’t. ‘Things end,’ he’d said the day he told her everything, and she had understood and for a while accepted that.

He had put his tie on, his jacket. A little of her tea had spilt on to the saucer and he wiped it away with a cloth.

‘I’m sorry.’ She whispered, not hearing herself, not knowing what she was apologizing for, then knowing it was for everything. For being a bother with her regrets that weren’t regrets, for her longings and her tears, because she had no courage, because she had come today and made it all worse.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I let things happen. I notice them too late.’

She shook her head. She sipped the tea he’d poured. It had no taste.

‘I have that way with me,’ he said. ‘I’m reticent when I shouldn’t be.’

The doors of the wall-cupboards were hanging open, yellowing green, as the walls themselves were. There was nothing on the shelves, nothing on the row of hooks above them. The saucepans and china stacked on the floor, the two chairs, the table and what was on it were what was left in the kitchen now.

Better to go, Ellie thought again, and again did not.

‘There was a nun we’d talk about,’ she said.

The bleak recounting of events affected Florian as he listened. It chilled him, but a nun torn from her vows by passion’s torment, and wretched years later her body floating on the water, did not seem to belong, had no place, surely, in a passing summer friendship, even though love came into it, too.

‘I thought of her,’ Ellie said. ‘It’s only that.’

‘You’re not a nun, Ellie. It’s different. All of it is different.’

‘Sometimes a girl would say the nun deserved her fate. Sometimes a girl would cry, and another girl would tell us to be reminded of the nun’s suffering whenever we saw logs blazing. The log man he was called.’

‘Ellie -’

‘How is it different? How is it, though?’

About to answer, Florian hesitated, and then said nothing. Did she understand more than he did because the pain was hers, not his? Accepting the burden of perfect faith, a novice had promised more than she could give; a man delivering fir ewood lured her from her knees because he liked the look of her. Could there really be an echo of that nun’s misery long ago in what so ordinarily had come about this summer and now must end? Was despair, with all its bitterness, governed less by misfortune’s content than by some law of its own?

‘When will you go tomorrow?’

The suddenness of the question, the change of mood, startled Florian and for a moment he didn’t know what he’d been asked. When it was repeated he said he would ride through the night to Dublin, that that was how he’d always wanted to go.

‘Come tomorrow, Ellie. At least to say goodbye.’

She did not immediately respond either. When she did it was to say it would be too much to be with him on the day he went away.

‘I could not.’

Florian sensed the truth of that: it was in her manner, and he heard it in her measured intonation. It was a wince in her face while she spoke, it was in the turn of her head when she looked away from him.

‘I could not,’ she said again, out of a silence.

They sat for longer at the table, the cigarette Florian had put out to smoke unsmoked, the tea he’d made gone cold. This was what he would take with him, he thought. This was what he would leave behind. Tidily laid out, these moments now would haunt whole days.

He had pitied the infant left in a corner of some yard or on a convent step, had pitied the child given a place among the unwanted, the girl who had become a servant. Her loneliness had been his when they were friends - before, too greedily, he asked too much of friendship, and carelessly allowed a treacherous love to flo urish. She had come to him, and pity now was nourished by his greater guilt, and guilt was lent some part of pity’s dignity. A wild delusion seemed - because of what today had happened - to be less wild, a hopeless yearning less intolerant of reason. They sat not speaking, and time seemed not to pass.

The silence held. But when ^* they walked in the garden their choked conversation flickered into life again. The lobelia, the buddleia, the last of the smoke tree’s summer mist, berberis, garrya, mahonia: Ellie learnt the names, she had not known them. And they went to the lake to see if the summer bird had come back, but still it hadn’t. And then, beyond the plum trees, where there’d been raspberries before, they spoke of Scandinavia.

29

Dillahan turned off the ignition of the tractor because he hadn’t been able to hear what the man said.

‘What d’you want?’ he asked again.

The man had come from nowhere. A moment before he appeared he hadn’t seemed to be there. He didn’t reply to what he’d been asked, and Dillahan looked more closely at him. He must have come out of the field that had been Gahagan’s. Then he realized the man was Orpen Wren.

‘Is it Mr Dillahan, sir?’

‘I’m Dillahan.’

‘I know you, sir. I know you well.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not often I’m as far abroad as this, sir. It’s not often I stray away from the town. You know where you are within a town, sir.’

‘What d’you want?’

‘No more than a word, sir,’ Orpen Wren said. ‘No more than that, sir.’

30

‘Oh, we do, we do,’ the salesman said. ‘Wait now till I’ll get a few out for you.’

He was an older man, his back a little humped, starched white collar and cuffs, a shop assistant’s dark suit. Ellie hadn’t seen him in Corbally’s before. There hadn’t been anyone in the luggage department when she’d looked at the holdalls a week or so ago.

‘Bear with me a minute,’ he said now.

In the garden it had felt like a dream and it still did when she went back to the house for her handbag. He wheeled her bicycle out of the yard, over the gravel at the front, on to the road. He was waiting for her there and she mentioned the jammed zip of the holdall and he said get a new one. She couldn’t remember if she had looked round when she rode away, but if she had she retained no image of his standing there alone. She remembered noticing the Dano Mahoney as she went by it. There’d been the sign for Rathmoye, in Irish and in English, and then the Ford advertisement and the one for Raleigh Bicycles, and the request to go slowly. ‘Be sure, Ellie. Be certain,’ was what he’d said when they stood on the road. No more than that except to say to get a holdall.

‘We have this fellow.’ The salesman was opening one of the suitcases he’d brought. ‘In a two-tone or the blue,’ he said.

She had asked for a holdall, and described again what she wanted - something that would fold in on itself when it wasn’t in use, something that could be attached to the carrier of a bicycle. She didn’t explain further, she didn’t go into details.

‘Well, I’d say we have that.’ The salesman went away again and returned with two holdalls. He unzipped them on the counter, drawing attention to inside pockets. ‘We have it green. Or a tan with a Rexine trim.’

She wondered if he knew her, or if he’d ask after she’d gone and be told who she was by Miss Burke or the man she bought dress material from. She wondered if they’d talk about it, how she’d bought a holdall, where she was going.

‘I’d rather the green,’ she said.

‘That’s a better bag than the Rexine,’ the man said. ‘The Rexine finish hasn’t the appeal it had one time.’

‘Would you be able to parcel it up for me?’

‘I would, of course. Would I clip off the price tag while I’m at it?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘The latest thing is you have an expansion possibility on the bigger size of suitcase. We have one or two of that type of thing if you’d find the holdall wouldn’t be spacious enough.’

She said she thought it would be and asked if she could have extra string to tie the parcel on to her bicycle.

‘Of course you could.’

He gave her more string than she needed, saying it would come in useful. He asked her if she’d be going to the circus and she said she doubted it. He loved a circus, he said.

‘Drop in on me next time you’ll be in the shop,’ he said, ‘till I’d know was it a satisfactory container for you.’

It had still felt a dream all the time she was riding away from Shelhanagh House. It still did now, a salesman who was a stranger to her talking about a circus and bringing her suitcases instead of a holdall, giving her half a ball of string when she asked for just a little.

The Square looked different when she turned into it. It wasn’t crowded, but a lorry was delivering pavement kerbing in Magennis Street, holding everything up. She wheeled her bicycle around it, where people walking were going.

Miss Connulty must have greeted her. She must have said something because she nodded as if she had. And something was missing when so suddenly she whispered that love was a madness.

A restraining hand was on the handlebars of Ellie’s bicycle, and Miss Connulty smiled a little, as if to soften what might have sounded abrupt. The lorry slowly began to move. Standing aside for two other women who were going by, Miss Connulty said nothing else.

31

Dillahan tried to make sense of it. He sat on the tractor in the yard, and after a time the sheepdogs slouched away as if influ enced by his brooding. He went through it all again, every word that had been spoken, even by himself, his interruptions, his efforts to lead the conversation into areas that might be fertile enough to nurture reality in the morass of confusion. He went back, in his thoughts, to other times, searching them in turn for a connection with what had been said, threading fact and fantasy and finding in their conjunction the blemished truth. For everything was blemished in the talk there’d been, and at its best the truth itself might also be.

He climbed down from the tractor seat and slowly walked across the yard to the back door of the farmhouse, his gait affected by the disquiet he took with him. The sheepdogs stayed where they were, their noses stretched forward, resting on the backs of their paws.

32

It was late afternoon, just before five, when Ellie arrived back at the farmhouse with what she’d bought - tins of corned beef as well as the green holdall. As she rode into the yard she saw the tractor there and was surprised. It was parked untidily, crookedly, in the way other vehicles that came into the yard sometimes were. She remembered he’d said he intended to plough the sixteen acres where he’d had a crop of rape this year, and he had a couple of jobs to do if he’d be able to get down to them. He said he’d come in for something to eat between twelve and half past, and she had left out cold meat. He couldn’t, surely, be still here, she thought, and he couldn’t have finished the sixteen acres already. She wondered if the tractor was giving trouble. When the dogs didn’t come to her she knew something was wrong.

The house was silent, as if he wasn’t there. But she knew he was, because the dogs were in the yard. She didn’t put her bicycle away. She undid the knots of the string that held the parcel in place on her carrier, grappling with them where she’d made them too tight, forcing the parcel loose when she couldn’t undo the last one. She pushed open the door of one of the sheds. There was a pile of tarpaulins in a corner. As best she could, she concealed the holdall among them.

She left her bicycle where it was, slipping from the handlebars the carrier bags that contained the tins she’d bought. She didn’t want to go into the house. For a moment she saw the sunlight dappling the boards of the floor, her dress where she had thrown it down, one of her shoes on its side; she heard her own voice asking if the men who’d come had gone. As soon as he saw her he would know, somehow he would. About today, about every day.

She lifted the back-door latch, but something obstructed the door, preventing it from opening as freely as it always did. He would be lying there, the gun he went after the pigeons with when they raided his crops beside him. There’d been a farmer took his life near Donaghmore and they’d prayed for him at Cloonhill. A man who couldn’t right himself after his wife died, Sister Mary Frances had said, a man she’d known. And another farmer not long ago, gone bankrupt in east Kerry, found hanged. But the obstruction at the door was only a wellington boot fallen over.

‘What is it?’ she asked, not wanting to be told.

He was sitting in front of the stove. He had pulled the dampers out although it wasn’t cold today. The plate of meat was where she’d left it on the table, a mesh dome keeping the flies off, the knife and fork where she’d laid them, the bread still wrapped in a tea-towel, the butter covered, the teapot ready for his tea when he made it.

‘What is it?’ she asked again.

He didn’t turn round. He was hunched, his hands pressed together.

‘What’s troubling the dogs?’ she asked.

He turned his head then. He’d upset the dogs, he said. Being upset himself, he had brought that on. They’d been confused: he’d go and settle them.

‘Why are you upset?’

He didn’t answer, as if he hadn’t heard, or as if it was too much to say. He went to the yard and she heard the tractor started. The kitchen door was open, but she didn’t have to look. He was a tidy man even in distress: the tractor was being driven to where it should be. She heard his voice with the dogs, then he came in again.

‘He was talking to me on the road,’ he said. ‘Old Orpen Wren.’

A coldness came in her stomach, her arms felt weak. Orpen Wren wasn’t sane, you couldn’t understand what he was on about. Nobody gave credence to his wild assertions, to his talk about people who were dead; nobody took Orpen Wren seriously. But the chilly feeling was still there, and she willed it in her thoughts that Miss Connulty would not be mentioned also, or someone else whom gossip had reached, someone she didn’t know about. Frantically in a hurry, her snatched words tumbled about, her silent plea made formless, no more than an expression of fear.

‘He talks to everyone.’ She heard her voice as if it came from somewhere else, as if she were not there, as if this were not happening. She tried to pray that it was not, but the words still wouldn’t come properly.

‘I was upset, what he said to me.’

She tried not to hear. She wanted time to go on, emptily to accumulate. She carried the shopping she’d done for him into the scullery, although not everything she’d bought belonged there. He didn’t call her back. He sat where he’d been sitting before and when she returned to the kitchen he spoke again, but she didn’t hear at first and he repeated what he’d said. Orpen Wren had held his hand up for him to stop and he had. He said that sometimes you used to see him on the road beyond the town; but that was long ago.

‘I thought he’d got himself lost,’ he said.

He didn’t go on, as if there was nothing else to say. He stared at the floor, hunched again, his hands together as they had been before. He was so different he seemed a stranger to her and she knew she was to blame for that, not he.

‘You’ve had nothing to eat,’ she said. ‘I left the meat out for you.’

‘I couldn’t take it.’

‘Were you here since the morning?’

‘Ten to twelve I came in. About that.’

‘I’ll make something for us. That meat will keep.’

She turned away, with the knife and fork she was about to lay as a second place in her hand. She didn’t look at her husband, frightened because of what might be in her eyes. He said:

‘Is it put about I could see her behind the trailer? Is it put about that I couldn’t see she had the child in her arms?’

‘What?’ There was only relief in her single, startled ejaculation, hardly even a question in it, hardly even the word itself. ‘What’re you talking about?’

‘Sometimes at Mass I’d know people would be looking at me.’

‘Of course they’re not.’

‘Is it they’re saying in Rathmoye she was going with one of the St Johns?’

‘Of course they aren’t saying that. Why would they be?’

‘He was on about the St Johns going with any handy woman they’d find.’

‘When the accident happened in the yard the St Johns were gone from here. They were ages gone then.’

‘There’s one came back. He saw her with him. A few times he saw the two of them. The old trouble, he called it.’

‘He says anything. It’s different every time what he says. There’s no sense to it. He hasn’t sense left in him.’

‘He was sorry for me on account of the child. It was for that he stopped me on the road. A St John came back, Ellie, the time I was careless with the tractor in my own yard.’

‘There’s nowhere to come back to. These thirty years, there never was.’

‘I didn’t know it that a St John came back. Only myself didn’t know it. He’s saying no more than what’d be said round about.’

‘There’s no talk like that in Rathmoye.’

‘I hate going in there. Ever since the day I hated it.’

‘Would a drop of whiskey do you good? Would I get the bottle from the scullery?’

‘I used wonder would people be thinking I had whiskey taken the time I backed the trailer. Would they be saying I had drink in me? Would they be saying I shouldn’t have backed with the sun in my eyes?’

‘That isn’t said at all.’

‘Better it might be than what was said to me on the road.’

‘Don’t listen to his old rambling.’

‘I never thought it’d be said what was said to me on the road.’

‘You don’t have to think it. It isn’t true.’

‘Did you hear it said yourself, Ellie? Did he say it to you the day I went for the loan and he was talking to you in the Square? Did other people say it to you? Is it that that has you troubled, Ellie?’

She said that no one had repeated a word of anything like it to her. All Orpen Wren ever talked about was the past, she said.

‘It’s the past has him in its grip, Ellie.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Coming out here, he was further than he ever is beyond the town. He told me that too. It was myself he was looking for, Ellie.’

‘He talks to anyone.’

He shook his head as he stood up. He went to the scullery and came back with the whiskey bottle and a cup.

‘I’m all right when I’m in the fields,’ he said. ‘Or when I’m with yourself in the house. It’d maybe be all right if I was walking in a town where no one’d know me.’

She watched him pouring out some of the whiskey that was kept to offer his relations when they came over from Shinrone once a year on a Sunday afternoon. She’d tasted it herself and hadn’t liked it. She said again that people in Rathmoye weren’t saying what he feared, that everything repeated to him today came out of a distorted mind, that Orpen Wren’s rigmaroles were all his own. He shook his head.

‘It takes a mad man to say it out.’

‘It isn’t true,’ she said again.

‘She came from better people than my own. But she never held it over me, she took me for what I was. I wouldn’t have said she was a flighty woman, I wouldn’t have said she was the kind to go with another man. But if she did who’d blame people for thinking what was said on the road? The age he is and everything, he walked the miles out to say he was sorry about the child. He said it wasn’t good that he never said it before on account of he forgets things. The rest of it slipped out, the way it would when you haven’t a grip on your wits. I always knew there was something. I always knew not to hold my head up in Rathmoye.’

He reached for the bottle on the floor beside where he sat. She thought he was going to pour more whiskey but he didn’t. He said again a St John had come back the time he was careless with the tractor in his own yard. You couldn’t blame people for what they’d think or what they’d say. You couldn’t blame people for reaching a conclusion. You couldn’t blame Orpen Wren.

‘What he said to you is nothing only rubbish.’

Ellie hadn’t sat down herself. All the time they’d been talking she had stood by the table with the knife and fork in her hand. She watched while he crossed the kitchen to return the whiskey bottle to the scullery shelves. He wasn’t a drinking man: that had been discovered by the nuns and passed on to her before she’d come to the farm. He washed the cup out at the sink.

‘I’ll make us something to eat,’ she said again.

She put the knife and fork down where she’d been intending to. There was a numbness in her mind, all panic gone from it. Nothing happening there was what it felt like.

‘He shook hands with me and then he went off,’ her husband said.

He didn’t want to eat, and nor did she. He went away and she heard the tractor again, before he drove it to the fields. In the silent kitchen it came coldly to her that the tragedy of the man who had taken her into his house was more awful by far than love’s denial. It came like clarity in confusion, there was a certainty: it was too late. And it came coldly, too, that the truth she yet might tell to draw the sting of his agony would cause more suffering than she could inflict, more than any man who had done no wrong deserved.

33

Waking the next day, Florian was first of all aware that his dog was dead, and then the day before came jerkily back, like a film carelessly projected. He had woken to panic in the night, but afterwards had slept again and now was calmer. What was done was done, what would happen would happen. He washed and dressed, made coffee, heated milk. He hurried over nothing.

It was eight o’clock when a van came for the furniture and effects that had had to remain until now: his bed, his bedroom cupboard, two dressing-tables and a chest-of-drawers the new owners of Shelhanagh had said they’d like to have, then changed their minds about. The radiogram should have gone earlier but there’d been a misunderstanding and it hadn’t. China was packed into a tea-chest, kitchenware into another. The skip would be there until evening, to take anything else.

The house was bleak, the emptiness complete when the men had gone, his footsteps the only sound. He prised Isabella’s picture from the drawing-room wall. He completed his packing of the small suitcase he hadn’t used since his boarding-school days. On top of what clothes he was taking, in protective cardboard he placed the watercolours, his most valuable possession. A drawer had slipped out of the heavy kitchen table on its way to the furniture van, throwing on to the ground his father’s waistcoat watch, his mother’s only jewelled ring. He found a corner for them.

The pages of the Fieldbook had served their purpose and he relit his garden fire with them. He put away the spade he had used to dig the grave, beside other garden implements that by arrangement were to be left. In the yard he thought he heard a sound, coming from the garden, but there was no one there. At the lake he skimmed pebbles over the water and wondered if, anywhere, he would play this solitary game again.

He missed the rattling in the reeds, the fleeing of the water rats. He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the upturned boat, listening for bicycle wheels on the gravel.

Ellie left the house only to feed her hens and to retrieve the parcel from under the tarpaulins in the turf shed. She took the wrapping paper off and filled the green holdall with stones from the wall of the river-field, then watched it sinking into murky water.

It rained in the afternoon and Dillahan cut the winter’s wood. In the shed he pulled out the boughs he had stacked, trimming them, chopping off brushwood with a hatchet. He had a couple of elm trunks, dead wood, dry as a bone. There was an oak bole he’d had for years.

The belts of the circular saw had slackened; the oil in the cogs was dry. He brushed out grime and sawdust, and his file on the teeth of the saw screeched when he sharpened them. He cleaned the spark plugs he had loosened. When he tried the engine it spluttered and then fired, with wisps of smoke and petrol fumes in the air.

He kept the engine turning over while he put away the tools he had used - wire brush and spanners, the hammer he eased the motor clamp with, screwdriver, his oil can.

When the whine of the sawing began Ellie came out of the house, although he always said he could manage. She passed him each next length of wood, hardly any of them too heavy for her. All afternoon it took, the logs falling to a heap on the ground.

The skip swung a little in the air before it steadied and slowly descended to the lorry. The chains that had lifted it hung loose, and then were wound back into the crane. ‘Good luck to you!’ the driver called out before he drove away.

Florian had left himself without a book and, with nothing to do, he climbed up to the roof to look for the last time at the view it offered. He remembered being brought there the first time for the same purpose; and later, on his own, reading Coral Island there. Once Isabella and he had tried to sleep on the roof, but the lead which had been warm at first became cold and they had crept back into the house. And it was there, one summer after Isabella had gone back to Italy, that he fir st became addicted to the detective stories that were his mother’s addiction all her life. Day after day in a heatwave he had read The Fashion in Shrouds and The Crime at Black Dudley, Hangman’s Holiday, Death and the Dancing Footman.

From the roof the far-off mountains were unchanged, but the crowded summer fields were earthy now, empty and orderly and the same. Autumn was in the trees, bright berries of cotoneaster in the garden, busy squirrels.

He could see the road and would see her when she came, but still she didn’t and familiar guilt began, without a reason now. It faded while he waited, and on the way down through the house he went from room to room, closing the door of each behind him when he left it. At the bottom of the stairs a figure stood hesitantly in the gathering dusk. ‘I came on in,’ a man said, explaining then that he was here to read the electricity meter.

While this was being done and the electricity turned off, Florian again imagined he heard a sound outside; and listened, but it wasn’t repeated. The bottle of champagne was still on the hall flo or, ignored or forgotten by the front door. ‘Would you like to have this?’ he offered the meter-reader; and as if such generosity demanded that he should be sociable, the man stayed longer than he might have, relating anecdotes connected with houses changing hands. Some people took the lightbulbs when they went, he said.

‘You made it easier for me,’ Dillahan said, saying it suddenly when neither of them had spoken for a while. She had made it less frightening; for you could be frightened, he said, and not know why, only that fear had come from somewhere. You’d see that in an animal.

When the clocks changed next month he’d drive her over to Templeross, he said, and she wondered if, even after she’d been to confession, the nuns would know. Everything was calmer for a penitent, they used to say at Cloonhill, and she accepted that it was. But still she wondered if the nuns would see her as she used to be, or as she had become.

Twilight darkened in Shelhanagh House. Florian threw water on to the glow of his garden fir e and stumbled about the empty kitchen. The tin he’d spoken about to Mrs Carley was already on a shelf in one of the wall-cupboards. He pulled over the shutters in the downstairs rooms. When he had locked the hall door from the outside he dropped the key through the letter-box and heard it fall on the flagstones. By the light of his bicycle lamp he strapped his suitcase on to the carrier.

That night Ellie didn’t sleep. She hadn’t slept the night before either. Not putting on the light she had got up and moved her clothes from the chair by the window and had sat there, looking out into the dark. She did so again, the window open a little as both of them liked it, the air chilly.

It was earlier now than when she’d sat there the night before, the last streaks of filmy moonlight slipping away from the yard below. It was a natural thing for a man who had accidentally killed his wife and child to dread suspicion. It was a natural thing that a tormented mind should be confused. In the single day that had passed Ellie had many times told herself all that; and told herself that if Miss Connulty asked her she would say the man she had been friendly with for a while had left Ireland. She would not deny that she’d been friendly with him. She would say his name and where he had lived.

At the window she began to feel cold, but still sat there. Tired as so often he was, her husband breathed heavily and was not restless. Everything had been easier for him since she came to his house, he had said this evening, everything better for him since she’d married him. There weren’t many who would understand, he’d said.

Somewhere, far off, there was a light. She watched it moving, and knew. She put her clothes on and went downstairs quickly because the dogs would bark. She lifted a coat from one of the hooks on the back door. In the yard both dogs sleepily emerged to greet her.

She could hear nothing on the road. ‘Come back,’ she whispered, and the dog who’d been inclined to investigate obeyed. The other one hadn’t moved from beside her.

The light was there again, coming out of the dip in the road, still far away. Sometimes one of the Corrigan boys went by on a bicycle at night, not often, and they never bothered with lights.

34

They walked away from the house, he pushing his bicycle, the sheepdogs with them.

‘I thought he was dead,’ she said.

She told him. There was a gun kept for rabbits and the pigeons. There had been silence everywhere, the tractor parked like that, the dogs morose. A farmer from near Donaghmore had taken his life, another farmer in east Kerry.

‘All day today I tried to think of nothing,’ she said.

They had not embraced. They did not now. He was a shadow beside her, little more than that.

‘Why have you come?’ she asked.

She felt him staring at her, trying to see her in the dark. When she asked again why he had come, he said because he wanted her to know that he had waited.

‘I’ll never forget being loved by you,’ he said. ‘Don’t hate me, Ellie. Please don’t hate me.’

He reached for her hand, but it wasn’t there.

He would have destroyed her, he said. Not ever meaning to, he would have. He knew it, in the way of knowing something that couldn’t be explained.

‘People run away to be alone,’ he said. Some people had to be alone.

‘It isn’t much of a goodbye,’ he said.

He let a silence gather and so did she. There was a rustle in the undergrowth that might have been a fox’s quick retreat. They paid it no attention.

‘He saved you. That old man,’ he said.

‘It’s cold.’

She turned away and he walked with her, still wheeling his bicycle. Any moment a light would go on in the house, she thought. Any moment her name would be called out, the back door thrown open. That mattered more than understanding. It mattered more than anything, was all that mattered.

She knew that this was so, yet still would have gone with him. She whispered, gathering the dogs to her.

‘I couldn’t hate you,’ she said.

She didn’t speak again, and nor did he.

He cycled slowly, the air raw on his face. The signpost to Crilly was lit up by his lamp as he went by. The road straightened, became a hill to freewheel down, and then the twists and turns began again. How useless being sorry was, and yet that, most of all, was what he felt, a soreness in him somewhere. Her grey-blue eyes had been no more than smudges in the dark.

She listened to the swish of wheels in motion before the sound dimmed away to nothing, before the flicker of light became faint and then was gone. The sheepdogs ambled into their shed. She crossed the yard, her footsteps light on the concrete surface. She lifted the latch of the door she had left unlocked, and closed the door behind her and softly turned the key.

In the kitchen she was guided by the votive gleam above the dresser. She took her shoes off and mounted the narrow stairs, each tread faintly creaking. The bedroom door was open, as she had left it too. She folded her clothes and laid them on the chair between the windows.

35

Orpen Wren slept. In Hurley Lane Bernadette O’Keeffe turned off a romantic drama and ended her day with a last long, slow nightcap. It was her happy time, when what she had was enough and enough was what she asked for. The cheques passed across the table, the letters signed, his putting to her this matter or that, his asking her what she thought, his acquiescent nod. Emotion, stalled, was not a nuisance in the night. The bright little screen, and night-caps, made a party of the room, its swaying furniture and uncertain floor, its garbled voices relieving Bernadette of a turmoil they themselves absorbed. That a beloved mother’s death had failed to loosen a lifetime’s iron bond did not in the cheerful night seem more than could be borne: so drowsy peace told Bernadette. And tomorrow - for it was not a dreaded Saturday or Sunday - there would be once more the papers fondly typed and carried to the quiet back bar, once more his commendation, once more their chat.

The Rathmoye street-lights had not yet been extinguished, but the streets themselves had emptied. The last of the public house stragglers had gone, the last of the lovers had parted. Two laundry women hurried away from their night work in Mill Street. Cats stalked the coal yards. Silently in the Square a mongrel dog ransacked a dustbin. Drawing back the curtains of the big front room in readiness for the morning, Miss Connulty watched. The dog - yellowish, its tail cropped close - would be there again, since every night he came. But still she paused to watch, even though the house was full, which meant an early morning. A single shaft of light caught the bony features of Thomas John Kinsella, his gaping shirt, sleeves rolled up. That, too, at this late hour was never different.

Miss Connulty had begun to turn away from the window, about to go upstairs, when a movement that was not the dog’s caught her eye. It alerted the dog too, who at once crept off, cringing, into the shadows. A man on a bicycle rode into the Square.

He was wearing the hat, there was a suitcase tied on to the bicycle’s carrier. He didn’t pause or dismount but went steadily on. Miss Connulty watched him turning out on to the Dublin road, and watched the dog returning to the dustbin. Soon after that the street-lights went out.

So all of it was over for Ellie Dillahan, Miss Connulty said to herself, all of it done with. Quietly ascending the stairs to the bathroom and her bedroom so as not to disturb the sleeping men around her, she remembered the closed sign pulled down over the glass of the chemist’s door, and her father pouring the tea in the café of the Adelphi cinema. ‘All done,’ her father said. ‘All over, girl.’

She washed, quietly running the tap. In her bedroom she undressed and Ellie Dillahan, coming again with her Friday eggs, confided in her; and Miss Connulty said if there’s a child don’t let anyone take the child away from you. Born as Dillahan’s own since he believed it was, the child would make a family man of him again, and make the farmhouse different. And her own friendship with Ellie Dillahan would not be strained, now that the interloper who had ill-used her had at last shaken the dust of Rathmoye off his heels. The friendship would be closer, both of them knowing it could be, neither of them saying what should not be said and never would be.

Miss Connulty turned her bedside light off and a few moments later closed her eyes, though not in sleep. An infant child crawled towards her on the carpet of the big front room, and bricks were kept, and dolls or soldiers in the corner cupboard, rag books, a counting frame. The secret heart of Ellie Dillahan’s life possessed the big front room, and later there were games of Snap and Ludo, and bagatelle, which as a child herself Miss Connulty had enjoyed. None of it was impossible.

36

On the streets of darkened towns, on roads that are often his alone, bright sudden moments pierce the dark: reality at second hand spreads in an emptiness.

Among the scattered tools, the nun stares up at nothing from where she lies. Girls close her eyes, although they are afraid. They brush away the sawdust from her habit and her shoes. They go to tell what they have found, then wash white-painted windows, gather wood. They sing in their heads a song they mustn’t sing, and wonder who it is who doesn’t want them. The windscreen wipers slush through rain, the man comes from the house and carries in the box. There is the place in the yard. There are the haunted days of June. She claims no virtue for her compassion, she does not blame a careless lover. She grows her vegetables, collects her eggs.

Horses canter in the breaking dawn, the open landscape fills, Old Kilmainham, Islandbridge. Seagulls rest on river walls, hops enrich the air.

The sea is calm, the engines’ chug the only sound, the chill of autumn morning lingering. You know what you’ll remember, he reflects, you know what fragile memory’ll hold. Again the key falls on the flagstones. Again there are her footsteps on the road.

The last of Ireland is taken from him, its rocks, its gorse, its little harbours, the distant lighthouse. He watches until there is no land left, only the sunlight dancing over the sea.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36