Selected Stories

Low Sunday, 1950

She put the wine in the sun, on the deep white window-sill, the bottle not yet opened. It cast a flush of red on the window-sill’s surface beside the porcelain figure of a country girl with a sheaf of corn, the only ornament there. It felt like a celebration, wine laid out to catch the last of the warmth on a Sunday evening, and Philippa wondered if her brother could possibly have forgotten what Sunday it was when he brought the bottle back from Findlater’s on Friday.

There was no sound in the house. Upstairs, Tom would be reading. At this time of day at weekends he always read for a while, as she remembered him so often as a child, comfortable in the only armchair his bedroom contained. He had been tidier in the armchair then, legs tucked beneath him, body curled around his book; now the legs that had grown longer sprawled, spilt out from the cushions, while one arm dangled, a cigarette smouldering from the fingers that also turned the pages.

Philippa was petite by comparison, fair-haired, her quiet features grave in repose, a prettiness coming with animation. She took care with her clothes rather than dressed well. Her blouse today was two striped shades of green, one matching her skirt, the other her tiny emerald earrings. She was thirty-nine in the Spring of 1950, her brother three years older.

They did not regret, either of them, the fruits of the revolution that by chance had changed their lives in making them its casualties. They rejoiced in all that had come about and even took pride in their accidental closeness to the revolution as it had happened. They had been in at a nation’s birth, had later experienced its childhood years, unprosperous and ordinary and undramatic. That a terrible beauty had transformed the land they had not noticed.

In the garden Philippa picked lily tulips and bluebells, and sprigs of pink hazel. Tom’s vegetable beds were raked and marked to indicate where his seeds had not yet come up, but among the herbs the tarragon was sprouting, and apple mint, and lovage. Chives were at their best, sage thickening with soft fresh growth. Next weekend, he’d said, they should weed the long border, turn up the caked soil.

On the long wooden draining-board in the kitchen she began to arrange the flowers in two vases. Tom always bought the wine in Findlater’s, settling the single bottle into the basket strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle. They didn’t make much of Sunday lunch – a way of arranging the day that went back to their Aunt Adelaide’s lifetime – and only on Sundays was there ever wine at supper. In the other house – before Philippa and her brother had come to Rathfarnham – decanters of whiskey and sherry had stood on the dining-room sideboard, regularly replenished, not there for appearance’s sake. ‘What you need’s a quick one,’ her father had said on the Sunday of which today was yet another anniversary, and poor little Joe Paddy hadn’t been able to say anything in response, shivering from head to toe as if he had the flu. ‘What d’you say to a sharpener?’ had been another way of putting it – when Mr Tyson or Mr Higgins came to the house – or sometimes, ‘Will we take a ball of malt?’ When the outside walls were repainted, the work complete, the men packing up their brushes and their ladders, they had been brought in to have glasses filled at the sideboard. A credit to Sallymount Avenue, her father had said, referring to the work that had been done, and the glasses were raised to it.

‘Well, I’ve finished that,’ Tom said, knowing where to find her.

‘What happened?’

‘She married the naval fellow.’

‘They’ll manage.’

‘Of course.’

She felt herself watched. Clipping the stems to the length she wanted each, shaping the hazel, she heard the rattle of his matches and knew if she turned her head she would see cigarettes and matches in one hand, the ashtray in the other. Players he smoked, though once it had been Woodbines, what he could afford then. ‘You’ve been smoking, Tom!’ Aunt Adelaide used to cry, exasperated. ‘Tom, you are not to smoke!’

He came further in to the kitchen, tipped the ashtray into the waste bucket beneath the sink, washed it under the tap and put it aside to carry back upstairs later.

‘Where’s the old dog?’ he asked. ‘Come back, has he?’

She shook her head and then, together, they heard their dog in the garden, the single bark that indicated his return from the travels they could not control. She glanced up, through the window above the sink, and there he was, panting on the grass, a black and white terrier, his smooth coat wringing wet.

‘He’s been in the Dodder,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere.’

‘He’ll be the death of me, that dog.’

The word could be used; they neither of them flinched. It had a different resonance when applied so lightly to the boldness of their dog. Different again when encountered in lines of poetry. Even the Easter Passion - recently renewed for both of them in the Christ Church service on Good Friday evening – gave death a hallowed meaning, and softened it through the miracle of the Resurrection. But death as it had affected their lives was still raw, the moment of its awful pain still terrible if they let it have its way.

‘I’ll be an hour or so,’ Tom said.

He scolded the exhausted dog on the lawn, and the dog was sheepish, hunching himself in shame and only daring then to wag his tail. Philippa watched from the window and guessed – and was right – that, exhaustion or not, Tom would be accompanied on his walk.

‘No hurry.’ She unlatched the window to call out, to smile because she realized, quite suddenly, that she hadn’t during their conversation. This year she would go, she thought. She would go, and Tom would live his life.

Rathfarnham had hardly changed in all the years he’d known it; that was yet to come. This evening no one was about, the few small shops closed, the Yellow House – where he sometimes had a drink on weekdays – not open either. Low in the sky, the sun cast shadows that were hardly there.

‘We’re invited to Rathfarnham for tea,’ Tom remembered his mother so often announcing in Sallymount Avenue, her tone reflecting the pleasure she knew the news would bring. The tram and then the long walk, for which it had to be fine or else, at the last minute, they wouldn’t go. ‘Oh, Aunt Adelaide’ll know why,’ their mother would say, and it was always only a postponement. Twice, Tom remembered, that happened, but probably there had been another time, now forgotten. The great spread on the dining-room table, the mysterious house – for it was mysterious then – were what the pleasure of those announcements had been about. Aunt Adelaide made egg sandwiches and sardine sandwiches, and two kinds of cake – fruit and sponge – and there were little square buns already buttered, and scones with raisins in them. In the garden, among the laurels, there was a secret place.

Perfectly obedient now, the dog trotted without a sign of weariness, as close to Tom’s legs as he could manage. ‘Well, wasn’t that a grand day, sir?’ an old man Tom didn’t know remarked, and the dog went to sniff his trousers. ‘Oh, I’ve seen you about all right,’ the old man said, patting the black head.

What a bouleversement it had been in Aunt Adelaide’s life! In a million years she couldn’t have guessed that the two children who had occasionally come to tea, who had crept about upstairs, opening doors they knew they should not, who had whispered and pretended in the laurels, would every day and every night be there, her house their home, all mystery gone. Often on his weekend walks Tom thought about that; often on his return he and Philippa shared the remorse those thoughts engendered. How careless they had been of the imposition, how casual, how thoughtless! ‘I shall have to lie down,’ Aunt Adelaide used to say and Nelly, her maid and her companion, would angrily explain that that was because of rowdiness or some quarrel there had been. Murphy, who did the garden, who came every day – there being no shortages in Aunt Adelaide’s spinster life – told them the blackly moustached figure, silver-framed on the drawing-room window-table, stern and unsmiling, was an admirer of long ago. They’d often wondered who he was.

Tom’s sister had been wrong in assuming he could not possibly have forgotten what this Sunday was when he bought the wine. Tom had forgotten because, he supposed, he wanted to; dismounting from his bicycle outside Findlater’s on Friday evening, he had been thinking of their summer holiday and so the aberration had occurred. Within a minute he had realized, but would have felt foolish handing the bottle back, and when he reached the house he felt it would have been underhand not to have brought the wine to the kitchen, as he always did if he’d bought a bottle. There had of course been Philippa’s surprise, but it was natural between them that they did not comment.

When he had passed the last short terrace of cottages before he reached the countryside, Tom softly sang the first few lines of ‘She is Far from the Land’. The song always came to him in the territory of the lovers it celebrated; here it was that Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran had walked too. Far ahead of him, the last of the sun no longer brightened the gorse on the slopes of Kilmashogue, where their stifled romance had been a happiness. Fiery, handsome Robert Emmet, foolish insurgent; gentle Sarah. In their company, Tom thought of them as friends – here or in the deerpark below the distant gorse slopes. They had sat in its summer-house, talking of Ireland as it would one day be, and of themselves, how they’d be too. They had wandered in the future, as Tom now wandered in the past to eavesdrop in pretence. Part of today it was, the walk and being with them.

He lit a cigarette. In loving because she could not help herself, Sarah too had been a casualty of chance, beyond the battlefield yet left to bear the agony of scars you could not see. They hanged defiant Robert Emmet.

This past filled Tom’s reflections as he walked on. If beauty had come to Ireland, tranquillity was its form: a quietness in Ireland’s dark, a haven these lovers had not known. His pity was for them.

Philippa set the table, spreading first the bleached linen tablecloth. It had come from the house in Sallymount Avenue, as the extra knives and forks had, and the Galway glasses, and the table in the hall. But anything large - the dining-table with the leaves that could be added, the dining chairs, the carpets, the wardrobes, the sideboard – had had to go for auction because their aunt’s rooms were on the crowded side already. ‘A mistake,’ Aunt Adelaide called what had happened, as if offering that as a consolation, since there was nothing else. Often she repeated it in that same way, and she would repeat it, too, when some visitor came, someone new to the district or from the far-off past: an explanation for the presence of two children in her house. ‘A terrible mistake.’

Sausages they were having, Hafner’s of course, which Philippa had gone specially in for yesterday, saying she had things to do in Henry Street. Sausages and mashed potatoes, and glazed carrots, which recently she had learned how to do. Then steamed fig pudding, which had been steaming for an hour already, and custard. Often Philippa wondered how it would be different, cooking for a husband. She sensed it would be, as she sensed Tom’s return to the house every day would be different, but she did not know how. ‘He’s more than a brother to her,’ their aunt had always lowered her voice to inform a visitor. ‘Well, being older, of course.’

She made up mustard, mixing it in the small blue glass that lined the silver container. They’d listened at the banisters when Joe Paddy came knocking wildly at the door. Supposed to be in bed, they crouched there, and their father said what Joe Paddy needed was a drink, Joe Paddy shouting all the while that a man was after him, their mother calming him, saying the Troubles were all over now. He’d been in himself to see, their father said: Dublin had gone quiet after the carnage. He had stood and seen the surrender in the name of peace; there was nothing to be frightened of now. But Joe Paddy kept saying a man was after him.

She pricked the sausages and laid them on the fat that had gone liquid in the pan. ‘If the man comes we’ll explain to him,’ their mother said. ‘We’ll explain you weren’t in any of it, Joe Paddy.’ And then the voices became murmurs, passing from the hall. She was asleep when there was shouting in the garden and she couldn’t remember what anything was about. They went to the window to look out and there the man was, in a soldier’s uniform. ‘We’ll explain,’ their mother repeated, in the hall again. ‘You stay where you are, boy,’ their father said. ‘You take another drink.’

The sausages fried slowly. She put the potatoes on. Tom would mash them when they were ready, and add a butter pat and chives. ‘I’m going to try for the Bank of Ireland,’ Tom had said, pleasing Aunt Adelaide because their father, too, had tried for the Bank of Ireland, and been employed for all his adult life in the architectural splendour of the College Green office, as Tom was now. ‘You’ll have the house, of course,’ Aunt Adelaide had said, months before she died.

From the kitchen window Philippa saw Tom in the garden again. He often returned from a walk like that, by the side door, not coming into the house at once, strolling about, dead-heading if the season called for that. She washed the parsley he’d earlier picked for her, and chopped it finely, ready for the carrots, the two bright colours of the tricolour – she’d never noticed that until Tom said one suppertime. He’d taken her away from the window and she’d whispered, ‘Poor Joe Paddy!’ because she was confused, and he said no, it wasn’t Joe Paddy who’d been shot. She asked him then and he said: because he had to, because she had to know. He hadn’t let her look.

‘Would you like a sherry?’ Tom was suddenly there, as earlier he’d been when he’d told her he’d finished his book.

‘Sherry would be nice,’ she said.

Anglesea Street, she thought, a little flat in Anglesea Street, plumb in the middle of Dublin. She’d always been attracted by that narrow street, not far from Tom’s office, not far from Jury’s Hotel, where sometimes they met for a cup of coffee in his lunchtime. They’d still do that, of course, and as often as she was welcome she’d visit Rathfarnham – at weekends, Saturday lunch, whatever was convenient. She could say so now; it was a time to do so, while they drank their sherry.

‘There was an old man I don’t remember seeing before,’ Tom said. ‘By the bridge.’

‘He’s come to live with the Mulcahys. Her father.’

‘Ah.’

Children would run about the garden again. There would be their laughter, and family birthdays. She would bring her presents, and with the years Tom would slip into their father’s role and be like him too, easygoing, with jokes to tell. The children would tell her things, have secrets with her, as sometimes children did with an aunt.

She heard the clink of the decanter’s stopper, the sherry poured, and then Tom brought the two glasses from the dining-room. It was extraordinary that the officer who came had wept in front of them. He had alarmed them, weeping so suddenly, so unnaturally, the brick-hued flesh of his heavy face crumpling into dismay and grief. ‘The waste of it,’ he mumbled. ‘The waste of it.’ The soldier who had gone berserk in mistaking Joe Paddy for someone else had suffered shell-shock. His officer – in charge of him, responsible, he wretchedly insisted – could hardly explain, so clogged with emotion his voice was. He did not know, for it did not concern him, that Joe Paddy’s connection with the house he’d sought refuge in when he was pursued through the streets was as tenuous as the unbalanced soldier’s was with Joe Paddy: once every two months or so Joe Paddy came to clean its windows. Madness and death: that’s how it was in war, this big, ruddy officer had said. As long as he lived, he made a kind of promise, he would not be able to forget what had happened in a suburban garden.

‘We’re nearly ready,’ Philippa said in the kitchen, but her brother made her pause for a moment to sip her sherry while he mashed the potatoes and sprinkled in the chopped-up chives.

‘Tom,’ she said and found it difficult to continue, and he smiled at her as if he perfectly divined her thoughts. He even slightly shook his head, although she was not entirely sure about that and perhaps he didn’t. Intent upon his task again, he turned away and she did not continue.

She imagined, in a small low-ceilinged sitting-room a coal fire spluttering a bit, a single blue flame among insipid spurts of orange. People didn’t live much in Anglesea Street, it wasn’t that kind of street, but that would suit her – the sound of handcarts down below, voices faintly calling out.

‘Thank you,’ she said, finishing her sherry when she saw that Tom had finished his. She rinsed the glasses. Thirty-four years, she calculated; she would be seventy-three when the same time had passed again, Tom would be seventy-six. 1984 it would be, sixteen years from the century’s end, as 1916 had been from the beginning.

He helped her carry the dishes into the dining-room and then he poured the wine. It did not seem an error now, that he had bought it. The wine would make it easier to say, the sherry and the wine together.

‘There’s talk of a new road,’ he said. ‘Out near Marley.’

‘I hadn’t heard that.’

‘Oh, some time well into the future they’re talking of.’

‘Maybe it won’t happen.’

Once on this Sunday he had predicted more war and more war had come; he had predicted Ireland’s wise neutrality and had been right. He would hate a big new road out there. He hated the motorcycles that roared up Tibradden, that crashed through fern and undergrowth and little woods, that muddied the streams. One day the crawl of lorries would take the freshness from the air.

‘Tom,’ she said again. She was wondering, she began, and paused, a natural pause it seemed. 13 Anglesea St, it said on an envelope, and they crossed College Green from Trinity, and then she heard their footsteps on the stairs. She made them coffee because coffee was what they liked, and cut the Bewley’s cake, ready for them. Why thirteen? she wondered, and wondered then if even now there was an empty flat there, if some premonition had winkled that out for her. Long legs her nephew had, like his father; her niece was beautiful already.

‘This summer?’ Tom said. ‘Port-na-Blagh, d’you think?’ He had been patient, not saying anything. A kindness that was, and his smile was a kindness too. ‘Port-na-Blagh?’ he said again.

She nodded, making herself because he had been kind. She talked about the summer because he wanted to. Three weeks away from Dublin and Rathfarnham, the sands at Port-na-Blagh unchanged, the white farmhouse, the hens that pecked about its yard. She loved it too, as much as he did, when they locked up and went away to Donegal. Even when it rained and her summer dresses remained unpacked, when they gazed from the windows at their ruined days or crunched over pebbles that never dried. They always brought more books than they could read, denuding the shelves of the Argosy Lending Library, owing a bit on them when they returned.

‘Or somewhere else, d’you think?’ he said.

They’d gone to Glandore once, another year to Rossleague, but Port-na-Blagh they still liked best. ‘I wonder what became of those widowed brothers,’ Tom said, and she knew at once whom he meant: two Guinness clerks who’d been widowed in the same year, who hardly spoke in the boarding-house dining-room; on Achill that was. And the school inspector who spoke in Irish came for a few nights to Glandore.

‘July again?’ she said.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘It’s often fine enough.’

He nodded, and she could tell he was longing for a cigarette. But it wasn’t his way to smoke during a meal; she’d never seen him doing that.

‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said.

He saw, again, the effort in her eyes, and sensed her saying to herself that it would not be difficult, that he would listen, that the words were simple. Once, a while ago, maybe as long ago as fifteen years, she had said it; and again, more recently, had come closer to saying it than she had tonight.

‘Low Sunday it is called, you know,’ he said.

‘Yes, I did know.’

He poured the last of the wine in the silence that had gathered. Once she had wept when he was not there; he knew because her smile was different when he returned, the marks of tears powdered over. Now, it was easier. Only Low Sunday held them in its thrall, her head pressed into the wool of his jersey, his voice not letting her look. Pity for his romantic ghosts still kept the moment at bay; she had her fantasy of the future. Fragments of intuition were their conversation, real beneath the unreal words. No one else would understand: tomorrow, she would once more know that.

They gathered the dishes and the plates from the table and took them to the kitchen. He washed up, as he always did at weekends. She put things away. The tired dog lay sleeping in his kennel. The downstairs lights were one by one extinguished.

The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as it would. Night settled, there was no sound. Tranquil 1950 was again a haven in Ireland’s dark.