The Silence in the Garden

by William Trevor

  ‘Is there a chance we could have the wedding breakfast in the Rose of Tralee, darling?’

  ‘Here? Here, in this house?’

  ‘Why not, pet?’

  ‘People would think it strange.’

  Mrs Moledy did not accept that. She’d had a world of experience in catering, she pointed out. She cooked food for her boarders every day of her life; when the house was full she was run off her feet and still she managed. It wouldn’t be the first wedding breakfast there had been at the Rose of Tralee; a day-and-night licence was easily obtained, midnight to midnight, any alcoholic beverage you’d care to name.

  ‘Absolutely impossible.’

  She pouted. In a moment she said:

  ‘Darling, I’d do anything to be pals with Villana.’

  ‘Pals?’

  ‘To be able to say hullo to her. To get on to terms, pet.’

  ‘Say hullo to her in a shop. She goes into Lett’s and the London and Newcastle.’

  It’ll be unusual for poor Villana, what she has to face now.’

  He did not understand this, so said nothing. His sister was marrying the man; she had chosen to and she intended to. You couldn’t control Villana.

  ‘There’s things your sister should know. There’s things I could say to her.’

  She went on talking and he occupied himself by trying to remember the name of the carpentry instructor at school. He could see him quite clearly, a small, bald-headed man with a foul pipe. He’d had a nickname, but that was difficult to recall also.

  ‘Going into Balt’s bed,’ she was saying. ‘And she unused to that side of things.’

  The man had worn a brown coat in the carpentry shop, presumably to keep the sawdust off him. He used to light his pipe from a gas jet he always kept going, under the glue-pot.

  ‘There’ll be a lot of talk, darling, on account the wedding breakfast isn’t being held in the Rose of Tralee.’

  My God, would she never cease? Of course there wouldn’t be talk. There wasn’t a soul besides herself who imagined it a natural thing that the wedding party should be held in a seedy seafront boarding-house instead of at Carriglas.

  ‘It’s how it was in the past,’ he patiently explained. ‘Always at the house.’

  ‘Darling, you go on too much about the past. The future is what you and me have to think about. Sure, you’re only a boy.’

  ‘I’m thirty-five.’

  ‘You were too young ever to have gone to that war, pet. You’d still be a soldier if you’d stayed at home.’

  The conversation was pointless. If he hadn’t a damaged leg he’d still be in the army: it was ridiculous to go on repeating the fact, the way she apparently liked to.

  ‘I often think of you in your uniform,’ she said.

  He did not comment, instead made a fresh effort to remember the carpentry instructor’s name. The man had been showing Asquith-Jones how to cut a dovetail one day and suddenly he’d lost his temper because Asquith-Jones hadn’t been paying proper attention. He’d struck poor old Asquith with the flat side of a panel saw.

  ‘He could easily be her father,’ she was saying, ‘If he’s a day he could be her father.’

  ‘Are you talking about my sister’s fiancé?’

  ‘He’s a right peculiarity, you know.’

  He saw no reason to agree, even though he shared the opinion. He said instead that the solicitor was as God had seen fit to make him. Comment was impolite, he sought to imply with his tone.

  ‘All I’m saying to you, darling, is there’s not so many years between ourselves.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘What age would you say I was, Jack?’

  He turned his head away, wincing because of all her modes of addressing him he disliked most her uninvited use of his father’s name. He had never wondered about her age. She was a widow was all he had ever thought, the daughter of a publican in Cahir, she’d once let drop. Her husband had died of a burst appendix, she’d let drop also.

  ‘I’m thirty-nine years old, Jack. Four years the difference.’

  ‘You look older than thirty-nine.’

  She pouted, protruding her lower lip. Beneath the sheet she drew away from him.

  ‘I’m no good at guessing ages.’ He had spoken casually, simply stating the truth. He endeavoured to make amends because he knew that was necessary. ‘I always think people are older than they are.’

  ‘I’d marry you tomorrow, Jack.’

  Unfortunately, he was unable to prevent himself from giving a laugh, even though he was well aware it would cause trouble. A display of amusement was the last thing that went down well; he had experience of that. When less outrageous suggestions had been made he’d been unable to prevent himself from giving a laugh, too.

  ‘You treat me like I’m a strumpet.’

  ‘Ah no, no.’ Again he sought to make amends, but he knew it was too late. The day she’d addressed him on the promenade he’d hardly been able to believe it, especially when she’d asked him if he’d like to come into the Rose of Tralee boarding-house. She enjoyed showing people around it, she said, and all the time she was talking he could smell the perfume she was wearing and he couldn’t help staring straight at her bosom, cocked out at him and quivering. Her large mouth shone with lipstick. She’d patted her hair in a way he found exciting.

  ‘You have no respect for me. You take what you can get.’

  He denied that in a consolatory voice. She often misunderstood things, he protested. He enjoyed her company.

  ‘Errah, don’t tell me lies. D’you think I’m brainless? D’you think I’m some type of a jellyfish you have relations with? And what d’you consider you are yourself, boy? Did you ever do a hand’s turn in your life?’

  He rose immediately. Standing naked, he quietly said he would not be spoken to like that. Unexpectedly, and for a most unpleasant moment, he imagined his father looking down at him from beyond the dead, and then looking away in extreme distaste. This was definitely the end, he stated in the same quiet tone; a conclusion had been reached in the relationship.

  ‘Ridiculous tantrums,’ she said.

  He moved away and drew his clothes on, keeping to one side of the net curtains in case he should be glimpsed from the street. It was nonsense that she was only thirty-nine, more like fifty. Had she gone insane that she could mention marriage, that she could contemplate being the mistress of Carriglas?

  ‘The man selling fish was talking about you the other day,’ she casually remarked, and when he displayed no interest she repeated the information.

  ‘What the fishmonger says is his own business.’

  ‘Isn’t it interesting, though, he would have the cheek?’

  He knotted his tie and bent to attend to his shoelaces. He had no wish to remain in the room, hearing a fishmonger’s conversation at second hand. He said so, not raising his voice.

  ‘I will tell you this,’ she said, ‘which I heard from that same man. The bridge will be called after Cornelius Dowley.’

  He looked up, the end of a lace between his fingers, ‘Is that true?’ he said after a moment.

  ‘What d’you mean true, darling?’

  ‘Is it like the Confession thing?’

  ‘What Confession thing?’

  ‘You pretended a certain state of affairs in order to annoy me.’

  ‘Come back into the bed, honey.’

  ‘Is it true about the bridge?’

  ‘I’m only repeating what I was told by the fish man. Sure, does it matter, Jack? Didn’t Dowley get the works from the Tans? Dowley’s dust and old bones by now, honey.’

  He completed the tying of his shoelaces, then straightened up. He buttoned his waistcoat and drew on his jacket.

  ‘Is it true?’ he said again.

  ‘I never told you a lie, boy.’

  That in itself was a lie, but he knew by looking at her that what she was reporting about the bridge was the truth. More than once it had crossed John James’s mind that the b
ridge might be given a title of some kind; he had even imagined permission being sought for his father’s name to be carved on a stone. The Rollestons were the island family; they had been humane at the time of the potato blight; they had given generously, seeking no reward. Words on the bridge might have remembered that, through a memorial to one of them.

  ‘Ah, pet, don’t go being a crosspatch. Didn’t I tell you I’d lend you the money for a motor-car? I wouldn’t go back on a promise, pet, no matter what you say to me.’

  ‘We don’t need a motor-car.’

  ‘Come back into bed, honey.’

  She made a kissing sound, smiling at him. She threw the bedclothes back and held her breasts towards him. She told him to forget about the bridge, she told him to forget about everything. There was no one like him, she said. ‘Don’t be a crosspatch,’ she urged again.

  ‘I’m not a crosspatch.’

  He longed to do as she invited. He longed to loosen his tie and slip it from his neck. He longed to undo the buttons of his waistcoat with dawdling anticipation, and to be drawn again into the warmth of her bulk. But he shook his head and left the bedroom.

  ‘There’s a thing I have to tell you, Tom,’ his mother said in the kitchen of the gate-lodge. She turned from the range and placed his tea in front of him: a plate of fried bread and a narrow rasher of bacon. ‘The bridge is going to be called after Cornelius Dowley.’

  Tom knew. They’d been talking about it in the convent. ‘Shh,’ one of the girls had reprimanded, suddenly realising that among all the renowned exploits of Cornelius Dowley there was the blowing to pieces of Tom’s father in mistake for someone else.

  ‘I heard it,’ he said.

  ‘What did they say, Tom?’

  ‘Only that.’

  He cut the bacon and a piece of fried bread to go with it. He returned his knife and fork to the plate between each mouthful, the way she liked him to. ‘Hey, look,’ a boy called Slattery had said once, pointing at the steps of the old billiard-hall. ‘That’s where the Tans shot Corny Dowley.’ A padlock secured the doors of the billiard-hall now, but if you climbed up to one of the windows you could see the three billiard tables inside, with big square-shaded lights hanging close above their green surfaces. There were cigarette-butts on the floor and a broken glass in a corner. ‘Corny Dowley was a great fellow,’ Slattery had said.

  Beside him at the table, his mother poured what remained of the fat from the frying-pan into a bowl, adding it to dripping that had already set. She ran water on to the pan at the sink and put it to steep on the draining-board. She returned to the range, saying she’d black-lead the parts of it that weren’t hot.

  ‘It’s unfortunate they decided that,’ she said.

  When the girl had mentioned about the bridge, and when the girls she was with had looked in his direction, he’d felt shy but he hadn’t been upset. He hadn’t been upset at the billiard-hall when Slattery had said Corny Dowley was a great fellow, although he’d already known that Corny Dowley had been responsible for his father’s death. He’d never even seen a photograph of his father.

  ‘Dowley came from the island,’ his mother said. ‘That’s why they’re doing it.’

  ‘I heard he came from here.’

  Corny Dowley’s best-remembered exploit was the ambush at Lahane crossroads. Brother Meagher from the Christian Brothers’ had arrived at the convent specially one morning, to take the class to see the place—a mile out of the town on the back road behind the slaughterhouse. But long before that Tom had heard the story of a man lying waiting for half a night in a ditch at Lahane crossroads. Four other men had been crouched behind the stone walls that skirted the roads which met there; all of them had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. Less than a quarter of a mile away the road from Mallow was mined to catch the Black and Tans, and when the first lorry was blown up the soldiers in the lorries behind it made their way forward on foot and walked into the trap at the crossroads. In the end nineteen Black and Tans lay dead, scattered around the blown-up lorry and at the crossroads, and there was more to the story still. While the remaining forces in the neighbourhood were searching for those responsible, Cornelius Dowley and his companions raided the barracks and carried away a haul of guns and ammunition. Nothing more daring had been perpetrated in the neighbourhood, or carried out so skilfully.

  At Lahane crossroads, while Brother Meagher retailed all that again, Tom had imagined the man from the island lying in one of the deeply dug ditches, and the tips of the rifles poking out through the stones of the walls. He imagined the great explosion there had been, the waiting men not moving when they heard it, intent on watching for the remaining Black and Tans to appear out of the dust and the smoke. ‘Like devils they came,’ Brother Meagher said.

  Brother Meagher’s eyebrows met across his forehead. There was something the matter with his fingernails which prevented them from growing. He had dark jowls, and opaque eyes that became excited when he talked about the heroes and martyrs of the past: this was his particular subject. Addressing the class at the crossroads, he related how—generations before the time of Corny Dowley—the head of an obstreperous tenant-farmer had been stuck on to the sharpened branch of a tree on this very spot, a warning that obedience was expected. Corny Dowley would have known it, he said, and would maybe have smiled over the shadow the tree still cast as he waited in the ditch. ‘D’you see the shadow now?’ Brother Meagher continued, pointing through the sunlight at the dark outline on the road. The shadow was special, he said.

  While he ate his bacon and fried bread and while his mother began the black-leading of the range, Tom reminded her of that excursion to Lahane crossroads. ‘Time enough for Meagher to be getting at you,’ she’d said at the time. Neck Daly and Deso Furphy, who’d left the convent last summer to go on to the Christian Brothers’, said that Brother Meagher chalked up the names of heroes and martyrs on the blackboard and you had to learn them off. You had to remember that the life of a martyr was cut short because he wouldn’t salute a heresy, or bend to a foreign foe. If you didn’t know that off pat you’d get the strap. You had to remember when Brother Meagher touched the name Daniel O’Connell with the tip of his cane that Daniel O’Connell was the Liberator. Neck Daly said once that Daniel O’Connell had died in his bed after drinking too much Italian whiskey. Holy Mullihan reported him and he got the strap for telling lies.

  ‘You’ll need to behave yourself with the Brothers, Tom,’ his mother said when he reminded her of all that now. ‘It’s not like with the nuns.’

  ‘Ah sure, I know it isn’t.’

  He was nervous about going on to the Brothers, but one good thing was that by the time he got there Holy Mullihan would have left. They usually went away altogether when they were going to become priests; Holy Mullihan mightn’t even be about the streets any more. Cathal Lenihan, who was the same age as Tom, couldn’t make up his mind whether he was called for the priesthood or the Brothers. ‘Well, what are ye all going to be?’ Father Pierce had asked one day when he came in to hear the catechism, and Cathal Lenihan had explained his dilemma. ‘The Christian Brothers are a fine body of men,’ Father Pierce had said, and added jokingly: ‘We won’t comment on the priests.’ Two girls had put up their hands when he asked if there was any girl present who was aiming to be a nun, and he said that was great. Then Derek Birthistle said he was going into Burke’s the auctioneers like his father, and Cluck Walsh that he was all set for America. ‘There’s a lot of us in America,’ Father Pierce commented. ‘You won’t lack for companions, Cluck.’ He mentioned the man who had given the town the piece of land for recreation purposes after he’d become a candy king in San Francisco. There was many a story of a poor Irish boy ending up in some city like San Francisco, or New York or Chicago. ‘Don’t forget us in that case,’ he said to Cluck Walsh, and everyone laughed because they knew Cluck Walsh wouldn’t get more than a yard out of the town.

  ‘There’s people might mention it to you,’ Tom’s mother sai
d, not turning round from the range, ‘about the bridge. And maybe about how your father and myself were a week off getting married. Take no notice of that talk, Tom.’

  He might have told her about Holy Mullihan when she said that. He might have told her that sometimes the girls on the ferryboat looked at him interestedly, that Sister Sullivan always looked at him as if he’d done something wrong, that he felt Brother Meagher didn’t like him. Father Pierce had once stopped specially when he saw him, on the street outside Barry’s. ‘You’ve more prayers to say than others, Tom,’ was what the priest had said. ‘But I wouldn’t agree that was a bad thing. Never object to getting down on your knees, Tom.’

  ‘I’ll take no notice,’ he promised his mother, not knowing why he pretended no one had ever said anything at all. He’d never even mentioned Holy Mullihan to her.

  ‘You’re not forgetting to keep the well tidy?’ she said, returning the black-lead and the brushes to the cupboard she’d taken them from. She had a smudge of the black-lead on her forehead, and he drew her attention to it because she’d be cross if she went to the house like that, the way she was when she’d gone up with a mark of egg yolk on her overall.

  ‘I’ll go over to the well tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s great you look after it, Tom.’

  She left the kitchen soon afterwards to go up and cook the Rollestons’ dinner for them, and as soon as she’d gone he remembered he should have asked her to bring him back a piece of butter-paper to trace a map on. The bays and harbours had to be marked in and named. Next week it would be the mountains, the week after it would be the rivers. ‘Ask your mother for a bit of butter-paper,’ Sister Sullivan always advised when a map had to be traced, and if anyone raised a hand to say there wouldn’t be butter-paper in the house she would reply that in that case it would have to be obtained elsewhere. ‘No good attending school if you don’t assist yourselves,’ Sister Sullivan often said. ‘You might as well stop back in the fields.’

  So Tom ran after his mother and asked her on the avenue if she’d bring him back a piece of butter-paper. She said she would. She said she’d leave it on the kitchen table and he could draw the map in the morning, before he went to school.